


Buried For All Time, His Stargate

by KryptonianHero



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Stargate (1994), Stargate - All Media Types, Supergirl (TV 2015), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS, Ancient Egypt, F/F, Rewrite, Stargate, Stargate (Movie) Rewrite
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-07-28 19:19:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 42,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16248164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KryptonianHero/pseuds/KryptonianHero
Summary: In the year 1969, Cat Grant and her father discovered an ancient artifact on the outskirts of Giza.49 years later, Cat Grant recruits Lena Luthor, an outcast Egyptologist to decipher the hieroglyphs on the large cover stone discovered with the artifacts. There, she discovers that the symbols are actually constellations that allows the ancient artifact known as the Stargate to be opened.A team lead by Air Force Colonel Alex Danvers-Sawyer and Lena use the device to travel across the galaxy to a distant planet which is heavily inspired by Ancient Egypt with some differences.Arriving on the planet, they find the inhabitants being ruled by Rao, a powerful being who was the inspiration for the Egyptian deity Ra.Soon, the team comes face to face with Rao, meaning Lena and Alex, with the help of some inhabitants, must fight Rao and her army of warriors to save Earth from being destroyed, all whilst trying to figure out a way home through the Stargate.





	1. Cairo, 1969

**_**Cairo, 1969** _ **

**_**** _ **

On the desert outskirts of the capital of Egypt, Cairo, from the nearest mosque, the muezzin’s afternoon prayer call pealed out over the last rooftops of a city that has barely changed over the last few centuries. Standing out in the ancient city is a freshly polished 1924 Rolls Royce, whizzing past the last buildings onto the endless desert. Moving south along the highway to Giza, the vehicle occasionally passes a farm truck filled with produce or workers.

 

Taylor’s message, as welcome as it was, was delivered at the worst possible moment. Professor Grant was literally in the middle of a meeting with the Egyptian Interior Minister. His excellency was ranting about the changing political climate and how it would be career suicide to extend Grant’s excavating permit. Grant, an American, had been in the country long enough to read between the lines. The minister wanted more of his money. Grant, who had become adept in negotiating, immediately counter-attacked. Making sure to act angry, he yelled about all the hard earned money he had already spent and all the jobs he had created for the Egyptian locals. He stood up and slammed his fist on the fine wood desk, reminding his coworker about all the snags he and his excavators had endured whilst in the city. It had been at that moment that the handwritten note was delivered to the professor.

 

He didn’t hesitate in tearing open the travel worn envelope, unfolding the small slip of paper inside, which read:

 

_Professor Grant,_

_Sitting down? I hope you are, because we discovered something. Something big. Probably a tomb, although it’s too soon to tell. It’s all very exciting. I suggest you get your rich ass out here AT ONCE!!! And don’t bring any of those politician nut jobs from the ministry. Best keep this under wraps for the time being._

_Taylor._

__

Refolding the note, Grant winced at the language used in the letter. He knew that the note, which Taylor had neglected to seal, had already been read by more than ten pairs of eyes before reaching him and the minister, whom he was now smiling at politely, who would learn its contents within the next ten minutes. With the way rumors spread in Cairo, if he didn’t reach the dig site quick, there would be a market stall selling overpriced souvenirs by the evening. Excusing himself, he rushed to the driver tasked with driving him home. In his perfect Arabic, he explained the new job and offered a sizable tip in exchange for speedy driving.

 

Within minutes, the fancy car was sliding to a halt outside the fancy hotel he and his daughter was staying at, picked up the plucky child, and were careening through downtown towards the zoological gardens. The professor’s fingers gripped into the leather seats, not letting go until they were well out of town.

 

Catherine Grant, his nine year old daughter, leaned through the partition into the driver’s compartment, practicing her Arabic with the driver. She had arrived in Cairo twelve weeks before, called to join her father when an important discovery had seemed imminent. A prodigious learner known for excelling at everything, she had become something of an expert in hieroglyphs, visiting the local museum almost every day. In the backseat, suppressing his excitement, Professor C.P. Grant, member of the Egypt Exploration Society and the American Museum of Natural History, looked everything like you would expect a gentleman to dress.

 

Grant and Taylor and met in 1960 when both men were visiting the country for the first time. Grant, the aristocratic family man from National City and Taylor, the rough and tumble student from Metropolis who had dropped out of school to fight in the ongoing Vietnam War before being discharged due to injuries. After his time in hospital, he’d wired home for money before spending time touring the world before he eventually ended up in Egypt.

 

Not far from the Great Pyramids stands the Temple of Ti. Overseer of the pyramids, scribe of the court, chief astronomer and special adviser to a number of Pharaohs, Ti was also known as ‘Lord of the Secrets’. They spend an entire week probing the tomb, discussing the well-preserved reliefs and friezes that adorn the burial site. When Grant had slipped the tomb’s caretaker a little bit of money, they were awarded access to a collection of fragments that had been unearthed by a Frenchman who had excavated the tomb over eighty years earlier. These fragments that were already ancient when Ti had taken custody of them had allowed the men to develop their present theory: that something was buried halfway between the Steps Pyramid and one of the Great Pyramids of Giza. The papyri had referred to a pestilence that was stolen and ferried away. The clues had been sparse and the chances for success were not good. If the Good Citizens of Stockholm had realized what an incredibly long shot this was, they never would’ve funded it.

 

But fund it they had. When Grant returned to Cairo the previous March, he brought with him the guarantee of one million Swedish krona. After six weeks of field work, the excavators discovered a burial chamber. Grant had rushed into town and invited all the newspaper correspondents and dignitaries to witness the opening of the tomb. Even Indiana Jones, the world’s most famous archaeologist, took time off and made the trip. So on a beautiful sunny morning, the entrance was cleared and the two men crawled through the opening. However, when they reemerged, embarrassed, all they carried was a mummified cat still in its wooden coffin. The press had a field day. Cruising southbound with the Nile on one side and the vast Sahara on the other, Grant couldn’t help but think about immortality, but when the Great Pyramids came into view, the archaeologist regained his perspective. The sheer size of the pyramids made him laugh at himself, wondering how insignificant his project seemed in the shadows of the remaining wonders of the ancient world.

 

But that was before he saw what he’d found.

 

Before the tires of the Royce had even stopped rolling, his boots were crushing the gravel with Catherine hurrying behind. He climbed the edge of a stone plateau that was older than every worker combined. But the plateau had been transformed, hollowed out by one bucket of earth at a time by the hundreds of workers over the past few months. Now, it had changed into a small valley filled with equipment. Nearly three hundred workers were working that day, with the great majority of them were local men.

 

The most activity was taking place at the far end of the site where workers were dumping the excess sand and rock. As soon as these men emptied their baskets and wheelbarrows, they turned on the spot and headed back to an even larger pit. A pair of hoisting cranes had been moved into place at the edge of this pit, where ropes were being strung through. They were clearly preparing to lift something heavy out of the ground.

 

“Daddy, the treasure’s over there,” Catherine informed, pointing at the cranes and workers.

 

“Yes, well I need to see Taylor first,” her father spotted Taylor and a group of other men at a worktable in the ‘office tent.’ They seemed to be studying something.

 

Grant, a man known for his unfunny jokes, had been polishing a joke for several minutes. When he came within shouting distance, he tried his luck.

 

“Ed. If we found a pet cemetery, I quit!”

 

No one laughed.

 

In fact, no one gave him a courtesy chuckle. The group’s intense concentration told him that this wasn’t an ordinary find. Both he and his daughter were caught up in the drama.

 

“We can’t decipher this. Take a look.”

 

Taylor made room for Grant to look at the large sheet of paper on the table. It was covered in strange markings, rubbings taken from an etched stone surface.

 

“Those aren’t real hieroglyphics,” Catherine said in English.

 

“At least not the kind we’re used to,” Taylor added.

 

Grant, voice suddenly edgy, “where did these symbols come from?”

 

“I’ll show you,” the foreman strode off, heading towards the dig site. Thirty yards short of the pit which was crowded with workers, all shouting instructions at one another. Taylor stopped at what appeared to be a gigantic stone tabletop. It was three feet fall and twenty across. The massive slab was the same color as the gravel it sat in.

 

“It’s a cover stone,” Taylor explained, “the largest one I’ve ever seen. When you bury something this size, you mean to keep it buried.”

 

Grant excitedly walked around the perimeter of the stone, inspecting it’s engraved surface. This was a big find. Not only was the stone a spectacle for its sheer size, but the surface was a stellar example of the carver’s art. The face of the monolith was perfectly organized like a target into a series of concentric rings. The outer ring contained thirty-nine characters written in the strange language he had been shown. Inside the next band, there was symbols that were related to ancient Egyptian writing. They seemed to be an extremely early/crude version of the hieroglyphs everyone knew of. Next was a ring of strange arched lines crossing the surface of the stone in different directions. Some of the points where these lines intersected were marked while others weren’t. It looked like an ancient form of geometry but it was the engraving at the very center that defined the stone as a masterpiece.

 

He hopped up onto the stone for a better look at the centerpiece. Over a background of the precisely cut arching geometrical lines, there were symmetrical etchings of the goddess Nut. Arching her back to hold up the sky, she fed the children of Earth from her breast whilst they sailed beneath her in the Boat of a Million Years. Between these, at the very center, was a cartouche in the classical style. Inside were six of the strange hieroglyphs from the outermost ring.

 

Grant’s head was swimming with thoughts, _“do these characters spell the name of some prehistoric Pharaoh that they had never heard of? Was it a message?”_

__

“This is weird,” muttered Grant. He shook his head and came back out to the periphery of the ring, where he studied the second ring for a few moments before speaking to Taylor and the others.

 

“This inside band is somewhat legible,” he states, “this one here could be the symbol for years… a thousand years… heaven, the stars or something like that… lives… that’s odd.”

 

“What’s odd?”

 

“Well we all know Ra to be one of the most prominent Egyptian deities,” Grant continues, “and at first, I thought this said Ra, but it doesn’t. It says Rao, someone I’ve never heard or read of before. But these outer symbol, what in the world do you make of them?”

 

As Grant bent down to study them, he asked himself the same question Taylor and others had been pondering all afternoon, __“_ have they discovered an undiscovered language? And if so, who were the authors?"_

__

“What are these things over here?” called Catherine, rummaging through the collection of finds, all tagged, bagged and cataloged.

 

“Those are little pieces of the tools and cups and things that the workmen used then they buried this. But… look at this one,” Taylor explained, holding up a medium sized gold medallion embossed with an __udjat__. He handed it to Catherine, “this was wrapped in a piece of cloth and left on the center of the stone.”

 

“Well at least you’ve found something lovely.”

 

“The Eye of Ra,” her father said, stepping down off the cover stone for a closer look. He turned it over in his daughters hand before speaking to Taylor.

 

“Very rare to find this motif on a piece of jewelry. Perhaps it belonged to a priest.”

 

Catherine held up the find to the light, admiring the jewelry until the men fell back into the conversation. She unclasped her own necklace and slipped the medallion onto her own chain.

 

“Taylor, if this is the cover stone. What did you find buried underneath?”

 

Just then, before Taylor could reply, a shout went up from the pit, and two hundred workers began to pull the dozens of thick ropes strung through the pulleys. Grant wanted to move closer, but Taylor grabbed him by the sleeve and led him to the top of a small hill to one side of the pit.

 

“Trust me, professor, we’re in the best spot,” Taylor smirked.

 

Everyone in the valley, from the most highly educated scientist to the poorest of day workers, understood they were watching a remarkable event: the excavation of Earth’s strangest archaeological find. Responding to the foreman’s command, the workers slowly pulled the ropes taut, lifting a giant quartz ring, more than fifteen feet tall up from its long sleep. Perfectly round and the color of pearls. The entire surface was etched and decorated in intricate detail, as complex as a circuit board and as beautiful as a sultan’s amulet.

 

“It’s one of god’s bracelets,” a worker whispered.

 

In his decades of investigation and research, Grant had never seen anything like this. In spite of its similarity to certain first dynasty finds, it seemed impossible that ancient Egypt could’ve created anything so advanced. Nine fist-size jewels were set into the ring at even distances, each one surrounded by a golden shroud. These shrouds were replicas of the striped Pharaoh’s headdress, or nemes, like the one on Tutankhamen’s famous mask. Running along the inner edge of the ring were the same hieroglyphs found on the cover stone.

 

When the workmen finally had the ring standing at a ninety-degree angle, they began to prop it up with a series of padded wooden poles. Taylor pulled the awed Grants a few paces to the right. As the sun passed through the device, they were surprised to find that the material was semi-translucent.

 

“What is this made of?” Grant asked.

 

Taylor shrugged, “beats me. It’s harder than steel, but there isn’t any oxidation or corrosion. Some type of quartz, but none that we can identify.”

 

Grant turned back to the ring and stood there calmly for a moment before suddenly erupting in a giant roar of celebration, “WE DID IT!”

 

Catherine watched as her father, usually so stiff and formal, wrapped his surprised Metropolitan partner, Taylor, in a bear hug. The two of them broke into a wild, shouting celebration dance, but then something went wrong in the pit.

 

The workers were shouting and pointing at something. Then they began to abandon their work before the support poles were securely in place. The huge ring tottered dangerously, threatening to fall over and crush the crowd. Taylor sprinted over shouting in Arabic.

 

Grant turned to his daughter and commanded her sternly, “you are not to move from this spot!”

 

She waited as long as she could, about five seconds, before chasing after him to investigate. The situation in the pit worsened to chaos within seconds. While people were leaping in to man the ropes, whilst more were fighting to get out. Everyone was shouting at the top of their lungs.

 

A moment later, Catherine could see the problem. A section of the bedrock had split, leaving a gash where one of the supporting poles had been anchored. She watched as Taylor and her father led the effort to resecure the beam. Whatever was at the bottom of the gash was sending waves of panic through anyone who looked down it.

 

Catherine could not wait any longer. She had to see. She hurried around to the far end of the pit and slithered down one of the walls. Her father and the others were working right besides the hole. She climbed over the ring itself and came into the circle of workmen at the center. She pushed her way between the men and peeked in.

 

“Fossils!”

 

“Catherine!”

 

She heard the anger in her father’s voice, but couldn’t take her eyes off the twisted figures the Earth had opened to reveal. Partially buried in the stone, the bones splintered as if crushed with a force greater than man, was a human looking hand. However, next to it, flattened to sharp angles was what looked like a large inhuman head. The chilling thing though was the shiny black almond-shaped eye staring out of the head. It could have been rotten biological that had petrified, or a thick silver of onyx set into a statue. Hypnotized by this mangled preview of hell, Catherine felt herself being lifted into the air, floating towards the edge of the pit. Her father plunked her down, giving her a long hard stare that meant his patience was at its end.

 

For several minutes, as the men worked to steady the ring in its upright position, she sat watching the last light of the afternoon deepen into the evening. She stared at the ring and came to a decision that no one could reverse.

 

No matter how long it took, no matter how hard the job was, she was going to solve this mystery.

 

She got to work immediately, running to her escort and making an announcement, “I’m going back to the car.”

 

Sensing he had no choice in the matter, he followed her back to the limo where she set to work thumbing through her copy of _Ancient Egypt_. Soon, she found what she was looking for: a picture of the god Anubis the jackal-headed deity known for shepherding the dead down to the afterlife.

 

“Look,” she aid, passing him the book, “that thing down there is Anubis. We’ve got to show this to my father.”

 

Her companion, who’d only gotten a glimpse at the carnage before he was given the role of babysitter, took the book and laid it across the hood of the car. As he squinted at the page, another chauffeur driver car pulled up. Out stepped the Egyptian Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Antiquities himself to pay a ‘routine’ visit.

 

As the bureaucrat strolled on by, surrounded by his flatterers, he tipped his hat to her.

 

“Good evening, Miss Grant. Has anything interesting happened today?”


	2. National City, 2018

**_**National City, 2018** _ **

**_**** _ **

Soaked from head to toe, lugging an overstuffed book sack and muttering to herself, Lena Luthor hurried down the street. She was a woman in her mid twenties with shoulder length brown hair tied neatly into a bun with white skin that is paler than the usual, what some would call ‘ghostly’. She had forgotten her umbrella and didn’t have enough money for the bus, which was ironic, considering the family she came from, one of the richest families in the world. Her shoes looked like hand-me-downs, but the long cashmere trench coat she wore gave her an air of respectability. As she walked, she seemed to be lashing out at some invisible enemies.

 

In fact, Lena had to ask herself whether she was really going over the edge this time. What was supposed to have been her day of renewal, her re-acceptance into the academic community, felt instead like her own funeral. Turning west on the corner street, she entered the little grocery store near the corner, hoping the store owner would let her put a bottle of wine on her tab. She figured that if it was her funeral, she might as well get drunk.

 

“Miss Luthor, my friend, what’s happen?” boomed Arzumanian, the large store owner.

 

 _“Amen ench shut ahavor ar. Nrank char hasskanum yes enchkar khalatse em,”_ Lena summarized her living nightmare in fluent Armenian, “so… I was hoping to get a bottle of red wine, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay it back.”

 

“I got idea,” Arzumanian replied, _“yes kpokhem,”_ Offering a trade. He needed Lena to translate a negotiation between himself and one of his suppliers who spoke only Greek. He wanted to make the call right away, but upon seeing the pain on Lena’s face, he suggested they put it off until the next day. With the bottle of alcohol completing her ‘look’, Lena stepped back into the downpour and headed for home, wondering how she’d ended up like this. She was the girl who had won the scholarships in her high school for her translations of Phoenician poetry, then had been accepted at UCLA when she was only sixteen years old. The young genius with the triple major in languages, philology and ancient history. How had she let so much promise slip through her fingers to end up a broken, lonely, unemployed and soaked ex-professor?

 

She splashed her way across the parking lot of a car garage, where she lived in the converted office space above, where she was several months behind on rent and already served with an eviction notice. Unless her luck changed soon, she would have to start calling everyone she knew to ask if she could stay with them for a few nights. He walked past the garage owner and up to the shop’s business counter.

 

“Any mail for me?”

 

Sitting at the desk was the prettiest girl Lena knew, Svetlana. When she saw who was asking, all the joy went out of her expression. She stood up and dropped two pieces of mail on the counter. A few months ago, when Lena still had money, things had been different. They had joked and flirted and even gone around the corner for Thai food. But when things were starting to warm up, she’d run out of money and instantly became ‘the problem tenant’

 

She inspected the day’s mail. A final warning from the phone company and another missing child card, which she studied, just in case.

 

Lena, even more deflated, walked out of the garage and sat in the rain on a stack of spent radials, staring out into nothing. Across the street, a homeless man was lecturing a cat whilst ten feet away, a tough-looking chauffeur was guarding a limo.

 

What a messed up city.

 

Her mind began replaying the conference and the speech she had given that afternoon to the nation’s top archaeologists. Most of them knew her by reputation and thought she was demented, a victim of one too many science fiction novels and television shows. Unfortunately, today’s events had done nothing but reinforce their opinions of her. The articles she had published over the year or so had been greeted with scorn. Even though her research methods and the depth of her information were still admired, the conclusions she had drew from the evidence were increasingly ‘different’. She was rocking the already sinking boat.

 

‘Ignores long established facts,’ was the typical comment. Some went beyond criticism into attacks: ‘Luthor is either misguided and incompetent or she’s engaging in substance abuse’. The one she had clipped to her wall was ‘this is the sort of archaeology we expect to find in _The National Enquirer_... her work has no place in the world of science.’

 

Lena was fully aware of how unconventional her conclusions were. That’s why she had hedged at first, publishing a very watered down version of what she truly believed. She was convinced that her theories conformed to the facts better than the time-honored explanations of early Egyptian civilization.

 

When she had walked into the giant Scottish Rite Temple that morning, she knew she would face a skeptical audience. What she didn’t expect was them to be downright insulting.

 

As she was making her way to the podium during her introduction, she overheard a pair of ageing professors enjoying the following conversation. Lena recognized them as two of the dinosaurs of American archaeology.

 

“Ah, another wunderkind,” snorted a pudgy, balding professor.

 

“I own socks older thank this kid,” chortled another one.

 

They gave Lena a skeptical once-over as she made her way past them. When they assumed she was out of earshot, they continued.

 

“Not quite up to Sir Allen Gardiner.”

 

“But let’s hope she’s not another Wallace Budge!”

 

Although Lena didn’t think it was funny, she did understand the joke. Wallace Budge was a dull lecturer, known for putting his audiences to sleep.

 

Once she was settled at the podium, the air in the room was thick with tension. She was an unpredictable scholar, something her profession was not used to. She glanced at the ceiling for a second, just enough for everyone to ponder what she was doing, then she suddenly turned and shot a question to the nearest professor.

 

“Sir, what kind of car do you drive?”

 

Confused, the old fellow answered, “a Ford.”

 

“A Model T?”

 

The man chortled, “I’m not that old. I drive an Escort.”

 

“I see,” Lena rubbed her chin, “power steering and power breaks?”

 

“Don’t forget the power windows,” the old fellow said, trying to play along.

 

“So, in the unlikely event that a long-dormant volcano erupts in Santa Monica tonight and we’re all exhumed hundreds of years later but wunderkind archaeologists, there’s really no chance of them mistakenly dating you and your car to the early part of this century.”

 

“The point being?”

 

“Henry Ford starts out, almost primitively, with the old Tin Lizzy, the Model A. Then, he slowly develops his product into the sophisticated technology we enjoy today.

 

“Which leads to my central question about the Egyptians. Why didn’t their culture ‘develop?’ I believe the evidence shows that their arts, their science, math, technology, their techniques of warfare are all there, complete from the beginning!”

 

She gave them a minute to mull over her words, then continued.

 

“What I want to argue here today is that the Egyptians of the pre-Old Kingdom era somehow ‘inherited’ all of these arts and sciences. Then, we see the flowering of what we call ancient Egypt.

 

“Their writing, for example. The hieroglyphic system of the first two dynasties is known for being difficult to interpret. The common wisdom holds that it’s a crude version of the more complex writing we find later. _But_ , what I have tried to demonstrate in a series of articles, is that this early language is already a fully developed system. A combination of phonetic and ideogrammatic elements. If this is correct, they moved from cave paintings to a complicated system for describing the word and themselves in no time at all. A few generations in fact.”

 

Lena paused and watched quietly as the first group of scientists made their way to the exits. She wanted to argue that the older system was more elegant, but since she was the only one who could read them fluently, she knew she’d be talking to thin air. She changed the subject.

 

“Let’s take another example. The them of today’s conference is Khufu’s Pyramid,” she began, “the same argument applies to the pyramid. Most scientists believe that this masterpiece of engineering must have been the result of generations of practice. According to this theory, Djoser’s Step Pyramid and the large tombs at Abydos are seen as warm ups. The learning exercises that lead to Khufu’s pyramid.

 

As many of you know, I don’t believe that. In my view, Khufu’s came first, being followed by the lesser ones just mentioned. The evidence supporting the traditional sequence of construction is in my opinion, nothing but folklore. Plus, the written records were made hundreds of years after the fact. The evidence we do have, in my view, suggests that the people living along the Nile were slowly forgetting how to build them, getting worse as time went on.”

 

Another group of listeners stood up and left. Others were giggling audibly, but Lena pressed on.

 

“Unfortunately, the attempts to determine the construction dates using carbon dating haven’t given conclusive results. Enough conflicting data exists to support any theory.

 

“But ask yourselves this: all these lesser pyramids are inscribed with the names of the Pharaohs who ordered their construction. The mastabas surrounding are covered with cartouches announcing the names and titles of their owners, plus extra information about them, almost like a mini biography. Now, typically we find painted histories in these, extolling the godlike qualities of the buried. The Pharaohs were the biggest egoists in the world and yet, the greatest pyramid of them all has nothing. Not a mark. Does that make any sense?”

 

An imposing older gentleman got to his feet and interrupted, “it’s an interesting theory, Dr. Luthor, one that most of us are familiar with.”

 

Someone in the crowd began humming the X-Files them, which cracked up some people.

 

The man continued, “you suggest that the pyramid wasn’t built for a Pharaoh because there wasn’t a name on it. But what about Vyse’s discovery?”

 

Lena rolled her eyes, “oh, please! That was a joke, a big fraud perpetrated by Vyse himself.”

 

Not only was that the wrong thing to say, it was the wrong way to say it. The audience broke into angry dissent. A few more began to boo.

 

The man who had brought up Vyse yelled, “that’s too easy, Dr. Luthor. If you had done your homework, you wouldn’t have to defame the good reputation of a dead man to support your outlandish ideas.”

 

“Before leaving for Egypt,” she began, “he bragged that he’d make an important discovery. One that would make him famous. Using his father’s money, he hired an elite team of experts and brought them to the pyramids. However, after several expensive months, with nothing to show, he fired the lot and hired a gang of gold miners. Less than three weeks later, they _discovered_ what forty centuries of explorers could not. A secret room that was _sealed since construction_. In this otherwise empty room, they found what would make him famous. The cartouche with the name of Khufu. The cartouche appears on three walls but not the wall Vyse hammered to rubble to enter. Strangely, the name is written in a red ink that has never been seen before in ancient Egypt. It is astonishingly well preserved but the best part. The typos.”

 

“Well what can you expect from an illiterate quarryman?”

 

By this point, Lena had abandoned the podium and was pacing the stage. She walked to a chalkboard and, with surprising speed, wrote out a series of hieroglyphs.

 

“This is the symbol Vyse claims to have found in the relieving chamber. Now we all know, if we’ve done our __homework__  is that Vyse carried with him the 1906 edition of Wilkenson’s _Materia_ _Hieroglyphica_. People such as yourself, professor, will not have failed to notice that in the next edition, the publishers included an apology for the spelling errors, including a list, which included the hieroglyphic for Khufu. They’d misprinted the first consonant of Khufu’s name. It should’ve looked like this…”

 

She drew an identical set of symbols vertically down the chalkboard.

 

“What an exceedingly strange coincidence that the cartouche that Vyse discovered is misspelled the same way! If a quarryman had misspelled the name of the Pharaoh, especially on his burial chamber, he would’ve been put to death and the wall torn down and rebuilt.”

 

Lena paused and gave the professor a smug/ugly look, “but I’m sure you know that already because you look like a man who takes his _homework_ seriously, _professor_.”

 

These last words were delivered just as the professor stormed out of the hall. However, Lena could feel she had won back some of the audience.

 

“Now if we could get back for a moment. Perhaps the real origins of their civilization lay bur-”

 

“Professor, if I may,” at the very back of the room, in a smart expensive suit and glasses, stood a woman who looked to be about 50 years of age, “let me say first that your command of the facts is impressive. I have just one question for you. Who do you think built the pyramids.”

 

This was the question Lena hoped to avoid. No matter what answer she gave, ridicule would surely follow.

 

“That’s, er, the whole point,” she told her, “I have no idea who built them… or why.”

 

A collective groan of disappointment went up. The stylish elderly woman nodded briskly, as if she were satisfied with that answer before she turned and left.

 

A heavily bearded man yelled out, “Atlantis? The Martians?”

 

“I didn’t say that,” Lena defended herself.

 

“You were about to.”

 

Lena spluttered, “you’re missing the point entirely. New geological evidence dates the Sphinx back to a much earlier period. Knowing this to be true, we need to reevaluate everything we’ve come to accept about the origins of Egyptian culture. We simply have to start from scratch…”

 

She didn’t need to finish, as everyone had already left the hall, including the host, leaving her to stand there, hands trembling.

* * *

As Lena sat in the rain watching the ink on her phone bill start to run, she thought about the old woman at the back of the auditorium again. How she’d like to chat with her over a nice cup of tea and then strangle her to death. She had breezed into the room just when she’d turned the tide and had asked her exactly what she wanted to avoid.

 

At length, she stood up and made her way upstairs to her apartment where she met another unwelcome surprise. Her front door was standing wide open.

 

“Burglars,” she whispered.

 

Normally, she would have run away and let them take whatever they wanted, but not today. Soaking wet, she slipped in and found the umbrella she had set so she wouldn’t forget it. Normally a real peacenik, Lena stalked down the hall, ready to fight. Edging around the corner, she could see one of them going through her desk. Leaping into her front room, umbrella at attack position, Lena found herself face to face with the same elderly woman from the conference. She looked up for a moment, raising an eyebrow at Lena before going back to her business, which was nonchalantly leafing through Lena’s papers.

 

“Come in,” she said, her voice calm, “your cleaning lady must be taking the year off.”

 

For the second time today, the woman was confusing her to the point of speechlessness. Gathering her wits and relaxing her death grip on her umbrella, she spoke.

 

“Uh, is there some reason you’re in my apartment?

 

The woman ignored her question, instead, picking up the graceful sculpture of an Egyptian woman that Lena had above her desk, “now this is a truly beautiful piece of art. I’d guess fourteenth century B.C., probably from the area around Edfu. How did you afford it?”

 

“Please be very careful with that,” she said nervously. Her visitor, sensing how concerned she was, set it down carefully.

 

“I’ve come to offer you a job.”

 

“Job?” her mind started to race, “what kind?”

 

Strolling over to a framed photo on the wall, she changed the subject again, “your parents?”

 

Lena nodded, “taken in by my birth father when my mother passed.”

 

“I’m sorry,” the woman apologized, stepping away from the photo, “my name I Catherine Grant, but call me Cat. I have some very early hieroglyphics I’d like you to work on.”

 

“Since when has the military been interested in hieroglyphics?”

 

Cat stopped talking and feigned confusion, “what makes you think this has something to do with military?”

 

Lena was guessing. She figured she must’ve flashed some sort of badge or credential to get in. And the chauffeur across the street had a military grade hair cut. Plus, the way Cat avoided the question answered it for her.

 

“I think I’m too old to run away and enlist.”

 

Cat was clearly delighted with how quick and observant she was, “very impressive. Look, I wish I could explain everything but there’s a certain amount of secrecy involved.”

 

“Well you can divulge this. Why should I take a job I know nothing about?” Lena asked.

 

Cat already had her answer ready, “you have no friends or family here in the city… well, you still have family but I’ve heard you’ve been on the outs with them since your father died. Your landlord mentioned that he’d served you an eviction notice and there’s a large stack of bills on your desk. Now it looks to me like young Lena Luthor needs a job. And after your speech this afternoon, I wouldn’t sit here waiting for the phone to ring.”

 

Lena didn’t know what to say.Those were pretty good reasons to take whatever job was on the table.

 

“But… there’s an even better reason you should come to work for me, Lena.”

 

This woman had a lot of nerve. “And what might that be?” she asked.

 

“To prove that your theories are right,” Cat told her.

 

She unclasped her handbag and took out a set of old, worn-out photos, holding them out for her to inspect. The pictures offered glimpses of the cover stone that her father had discovered near Giza. There was nothing to show the large ring that they’d discovered, nor the fossils. As Lena skimmed through the photos, all the muscles of her face went slack. The expression, one which Cat had seen before and had worn herself, told her that she’d just got a new employee.

 

“Enough!” she snatched them away, handing Lena another envelope in return.

 

“What’s this?”

 

“Your travel plans,” Cat explained as she began preparing to leave.

 

Lena opened the envelope, took one look at the plane ticket, “Nevada? Can’t we just drive their?”

 

“The location we’re going to cannot be accessed through driving. You have to fly there, where it has a private runway. From there, due to the size of the base, you’ll be driven to the final location. It’s impossible to get there through any other means.”

 

“Well… it’s just… I’m not real big on flying,” Lena mumbled.

 

“Well get over it,” Cat replied, deadpan. Then, with a small smile, she pulled the door closed behind her.


	3. Elsewhere in National City

**_**Elsewhere in National City** _ **

**_**** _ **

The unmarked, military sedan glided to a stop in front of a small two bedroom house in the suburbs of National City. Although it was almost winter, the sun made the street feel like an over, which was normal for the coastal city, but it did force the residents to hide inside their nicely air-conditioned homes. Even the dogs, tongues out in the shade, were too hot to come and play.

 

Doors swung open and two officers from the nearby Marine Corps Air Station stepped into the blistering heat. Their neatly done uniforms announced they were both officers out on business.

 

While the first officer stepped onto the porch and knocked on the wooden door, the other, who was carrying a thick black folder, surveyed the garage.

 

The front door opened, but the door chain was still latched. Through the crack, an attractive Latina woman in her mid-thirties peered out at them. She knew this moment was coming, as she’d spent the last two years fearing it whilst also wishing it would come at the same time. Now they were here, and she hated them. It meant she had lost the battle for her wife’s life.

 

“Mrs. Danvers-Sawyer?” asked the first officer.

 

The door slammed closed. The officers were about to knock again when it swung back open. Maggie Danvers-Sawyer, still in her pyjamas with her hair matted from sleep, scrutinized them. Years of working as a Detective had taught her how to freeze people in their tracks no matter their age or gender. But a moment later, her fierce expression became one of pain.

 

“Wipe your feet,” she said, then disappeared around the corner into the kitchen. The soldiers obeyed her order, then came into the house. The living room was extremely tidy, but it didn’t contain what the men were looking for.

 

“Mrs. Danvers-Sawyer, is your wife home?” asked the first officer.

 

From the kitchen, the sound of food being cut could be heard, “yes, she is,” she answered.

 

After yet another uncomfortable moment, he asked the empty room, “do you think we could speak with her?”

 

“You can try. Lord knows I have. End of the hall.”

 

Moving through the pristine room, they passed a shelf of neatly arranged pictures, each one in a silver frame. The younger officer picked one up, staring at a photo of people at a backyard party. The contrast between the life in the photos to the lack of life in the house was spooky, to him. The soldier carefully placed it down and went on. At the end of the hall, the pair found an open door leading into another room. This one belonged to a young boy, judging from the school trophies and action figures scattered around the room. It was here the soldiers found who they were looking for. Sitting on the bed, staring out the window into her own backyard, was a barefoot, pajama clad woman. Her greasy hair was down to her collar. A few moments later, she had been holding a pistol, rolling it in her hands, practicing pointing it at her had, wishing she could fire it. The moment she had heard their voices, she’s stashed it in the drawer next to the bed. Walking into the room, the younger officer smirked. During the drive from their base, his partner had recited stories about the famous Alexandra Danvers-Sawyer, and how deadly she had been before it all went to hell. But this, the out of shape, watery eyed woman in front looked like she was high on drugs. What sort of classified military communique could need this burned out building of a woman?

 

The older officer with the folder quickly stepped forward, “pardon us, Colonel Danvers-Sawyer. We’re from General Jones’ office.”

 

After a pregnant pause, the woman turned her head to look at them. Her eyes were lifeless, and she didn’t seem to understand who’d entered the bedroom.

 

The officer repeated himself, “General Jones sent us, ma’am.”

 

With a slow gesture, she motioned for them to sit down and get on with it.

* * *

 

Maggie walked into the hallway and noticed the door hadn’t been closed. She took a deep breath and moved to the hall closet, pretending to look for something. She heard her wife talking.

 

“...years old so you aren’t even sure if this threat still exists.”

 

“As I told you, ma’am, everything we know is included in this briefing statement.”

 

Alex was getting more and more annoyed with these two officers. They were from the same exact office that had run her out of the service, “aren’t you still worried that I’m unstable? Haven’t you read the discharge papers?”

 

The older officer hesitated for a moment before deciding to put all cards on the table. He leaned forward to emphasize his seriousness. He wasn’t sure how she was going to react to what he had to say, “I don’t think you understand, sir. They don’t want you for this project in spite of your condition. They want you because of it.”

 

That stopped Alex in her tracks. She couldn’t believe the audacity they had to walk into her home, knowing the shape she was in and then inform him that they wanted to take advantage of that weakness. She was stunned. Her eyes flicked up to the doorway and saw Maggie standing there, clearly listening in. She was trying to pretend that she wasn’t, but she was. She turned her head just enough to make eye contact with her wife but as quickly as she did, the younger officer was slamming the door shut.

 

As soon as she was alone in the hallway, everything came flooding in. The two men had come to offer her wife a suicide mission. The more dangerous it was, she knew, the more likely Alex would accept. She knew there was a high chance she would never see her again. She began drawing up the last chapter of their marriage, with her sitting at home waiting to be told that her wife had been killed in action. She closed the closet, then wandered back into the living room, pausing to straighten the picture on the shelf. She sat on the couch and looked around the room, wondering for the first time whether it wouldn’t be better if Alex went.

* * *

 

Twenty minutes later, Maggie watched out her kitchen curtains as the officers returned to their car minus the folder. When they had driven away, she walked through the living room to the back of the house where she heard the shower running. She opened the bedroom door and saw something that brought tears to her eyes almost instantly. Laid across their son’s bed was Alex’s neatly pressed Colonel uniform, with next to it the black folder that had been delivered.


	4. Fort Rozz, Nevada

**_**Fort Rozz, Nevada** _ **

**_**** _ **

After having landed on the runway and exiting the private jet. Lena had been rushed to a black 4x4 where the driver instantly began heading towards the base. The surrounding area was practically a desert, with the car kicking up a tornado of sand, dust and dirt. Despite not actually driving, Lena felt it necessary to check the large road map every time her chauffeur made a turn.

 

After nearly fifteen minutes of driving, the black car drove past a rusting metal sign that read:

 

_‘FORT ROZZ, U.S. GOVERNMENT SPECIAL ZONE’_

__

The car turned off the dirt road and onto a pristine tarmac road, where Lena saw soldiers at a large gate. Pulling up to the checkpoint, she encountered a pair of not-very-amused Marines, with their hands on holsters. One of them stepped up to the car.

 

Seeing that her chauffeur wasn’t going to help, as he clearly wasn’t paid to, Lena took the liberty to open her door window and speak to the soldiers, “I’m Dr. Lena Luthor.”

 

The marine spoke in a monotone voice, “your credentials?”

 

Lena made a grab for something on her seat, and before the Marines could draw their weapons, she handed the stack of papers Cat had given her. The marine studied the credentials before handing them back, waving her driver through as they raised the gates. The car began moving again. She expected to find everything you would associate with a military base, but instead, there was nothing but a few large mounds of earth with metal security doors embedded inside them. The only indication that this was indeed a military base was the group of marines guarding said doors. Lena’s chauffeur found a parking spot alongside armored jeeps. Lena climbed out of the car and opened the trunk.

 

One of the guarding soldiers jogged up behind Lena as she struggled to lift her book bag out of the trunk. She was just a few inches shorten than Lena, but her build was more muscular, thanks to many years in the forces. Her hair was jaw length and a dark shade of brown but it was done up in a neat bun whilst she was on duty.

 

“Lena Luthor?” she inquired. Before Lena could answer, the woman grabbed her hand and shook it eagerly, “I’m Lane. Lieutenant Colonel Lucy Lane. You’re a bit over schedule. Cat though you’d changed your mind.”

 

“I was late to my flight. Packing was a nightmare,” Lena explained. She studied the mounds around them curiously, “so this is an army base?”

 

“I’m not authorized to discuss that,” Lucy read her the textbook response with small grin on her face.

 

Lena had to grin also, “no, seriously. Is this a camp for army scholars? A think tank or something?”

 

“I don’t know what kind of clearance you have ma’am, and until I do, I cannot discuss the subject,” Lucy stated.

 

Giving Lucy a ‘whatever’ look, Lena returned to extracting the books from the trunk, now with somebody watching.

 

“May I help you with that?” volunteered Lucy, stepping in. Lena tried to warn her, but Lucy hoisted the bag over her shoulder like it weighed nothing, slamming the trunk with her free hand.

 

Lena liked to consider herself to a rather strong woman, so she was quite alarmed by the ease that Lucy was able to lift the load. She followed the soldier to the mound entrance.

 

Inside the mound was a simple elevator, in which Lucy took the pair down to the lowest level. When the elevator doors opened, they revealed a large cavernous hall. When her eyes finally adjusted to the new lighting, Lena saw they were in a very large room with a polished concrete floor. Weirdly enough, the only things in the room was a small drab shack made out of tin and a guard’s kiosk next to it. Lucy signaled to the guard without breaking her stride and the doors of the little shack opened automatically. Lena followed her in.

 

“What is this?” Lena asked.

 

“We call it the telephone booth,” Lucy explained, “like on _Get Smart_.”

 

Lena had no idea what it meant, even when the room began to sink even lower than where the elevator had taken them.

 

As the room went past floor twenty, Lena couldn’t help but ask, “exactly what floor are we stopping at?”

 

Lucy just smiled, “classified.”

 

Lena started to say something else, but the room came to a halt at floor twenty-eight. The doors opened onto a hallway so sterile you would think it was a hospital. Lena followed the lieutenant through the halls, past closed office doors and around multiple corners in this subterranean maze until Lucy stopped and banged her fist on one of the doors.

 

“Ramon? You in?”

 

The door cracked open to reveal a short man with long black hair, “you must be the new girl Mrs. Grant hired. It’s Luthor, isn’t it? I’m Dr. Cisco Ramon, Ph.D. on loan from STAR Labs.”

 

His geeky manner made it easy to like Cisco. She had heard mentions of him, of course. However, she knew of his background. He may be smart but he didn’t work for his position like she had. He had been hired by Dr. Harrison Wells, owner of STAR Labs the moment he had finished University with barely any experience in the field, unlike her. Still, judging by his quirky manner, she couldn’t find it in herself to despise him like she did some others doctors.

 

“Do you know where I am?”

 

“A nuclear missile silo,” came a woman’s voice behind them.

 

“Dr. Snow,” Lucy turned on her heels, “until Luthor gets her security clearance, we are not-”

 

“Come on Lucy, we all know she’ll be getting her clearance soon anyway. What’s the hurt in telling her in advance?” Dr. Snow grinned. Coming out of her office on the other side of the hall. She was a woman in her early thirties, and the exact same height as Lena. Like Cisco, she looked like the type of person you wouldn’t expect to find working in a secret military bunker. Walking towards Lena, she explained the location, “don’t worry, Dr. Luthor. This bunker has been completely converted but it is still technically a military base. Anyway, it’s lovely to meet you. I’m Caitlin Snow, the astrophysicist on the team.”

 

Lena shook Caitlin’s hand.

 

“Anyway, lieutenant,” Caitlin turned to Lucy, “I think it’s time we showed Lena to her new office.”

 

Lucy, holding back a smile, turned and led the group down the hall to a door. She pushed the door open and said, “this is where you’ll be working.”

 

Lena couldn’t believe her eyes. The office was the size of a small warehouse. The walls were covered with charcoal rubbings and enlargements of hieroglyphics. On the work table, a slew of computer equipment was hooked up and working. Two smaller tables held multiple priceless artifacts and the bookshelf was filled to the brim with every conceivable volume on the subject of hieroglyphs. There was even a mini kitchen. However it was none of this that caught Lena’s attention. Directly across from the table, fixed to the wall was a large round object, covered in a sheet. Lena figured it must be the cover stone Cat Grant had shown her. She walked up to the artifact and pulled down the cloth, revealing the treasure.

 

This was the moment she’d flown all the way from National City for and it didn’t disappoint. Amazed and delighted, the woman stood there gaping up at the stone.

 

As she did this, Cat came to the door, nodded hello to the others and entered the room, letting Lena know she was there.

 

“Glad you could join us.”

 

Lena turned and looked at her. Her lips moved as if to speak, but no words came out. She looked back at the giant monolith once more before asking the obvious question.

 

“Where on Earth did you find this thing?”

 

“The Giza Plateau in 1969,” Cat explained, “you can see that there are two rings of hieroglyphs. With Cisco’s help, we’ve translated the inner track, which is clearly an early form of hieroglyph. The problem though, is the outer track. The symbols are unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

 

Cat gave Lena a few minutes to absorb the information.

 

She continued, “although we’ve showed these to a number of experts, including a few from your lecture the other day, no one has been able to make sense of it. We originally assumed the two scripts might be parallel translations but if they are, we can’t see any similarities. It doesn’t help that it’s in a circle without any viewable punctuation.”

 

Once Cat finished, Cisco began a long explanation of the various decoding programmes that had been used. Whilst he did this, Lena’s attention wandered to a translation written on a portable blackboard near the artifact. She was barely listening when she interrupted him.

 

“This is wrong.”

 

Moving to the blackboard, she picked up a cloth and with one swift stroke, the word __‘_ TIME _’__  was removed from the board. She picked up the large piece of chalk and put the word __‘_ YEARS _’__ in its place.

 

“Excuse me!” Cisco gasped in mock horror as Lena ‘defiled’ his work. He looked to Cat for her support but the older woman shrugged.

 

Lena was completely comfortable with the hieroglyphs. Over the last three years, the woman had become perfectly fluent in the dead language. Although many of the symbols remained the same, the grammar was different. There were probably less than ten people in the world who could read them. Lena had believed Cisco would be one of them.

 

“You used Budge, didn’t you? Why oh why do they keep reprinting his books?” erasing and rewriting at incredible speed, Lena fell into her usual rhythm as she tried to capture not only the literal meaning but the sense of the script. Then she stopped, puzzled.

 

“Now this is curious,” she said to no one in particular, “the word _qebeh_  is followed by an adverbial _sedjemen-ef_ with a _cleft_ subject,” she turned to Cisco and frowned, asking, “in his sarcophagus? I don’t think so, Dr. Ramon. ‘Sealed and buried’ is a little more accurate.”

 

As Lena continued to work, the other people in the room exchanged impressed glances. They’d all watched Cisco work for weeks to translate the message. Lena’s speed was incredible. Within minutes, she had finished and backed away from the board, moving to the stones. She offered the audience a play by play, or rather a glyph by glyph, reading of the ancient message.

 

“Beginning here,” she states, “it reads __‘_ A MILLION YEARS INTO THE SKY IS RAO, SUN GOD’_,” she turns to everyone, “which is strange, considering the Egyptian sun god was Ra, not this ‘Rao’, who I’ve never heard of,” she looks back, continuing, “ _'SEALED AND BURIED FOR ALL TIME HIS…’_ ” moving back to the board, she used the eraser again to remove the last word of the original translation, “not __‘_ DOOR TO HEAVEN’_. The proper translation is __‘_ STARGATE’_.”

 

Everyone stared at Lena, stunned.

 

“Alright,” Lena continued, not losing momentum, “will somebody tell me why the military has an astrophysicist working with archaeologists in a hidden silo studying Egyptian artifacts that are five thousand years old?”

 

“My report says ten thousand.”

 

In the doorway stood Colonel Alex Danvers-Sawyer. Her red hair was no longer shoulder length. Now it was jaw length and unlike Lucy’s, it wasn’t held up. She had undergone a complete transformation. She now looked like a commanding officer, and not grieving woman.

 

Lucy, spotting the insignia on Alex’s uniform, snapped to attention, “ma’am!”

 

“At ease, Lane.”

 

Opening her black folder, Alex removed a document and handed it over to Lucy for inspection. There was nothing outwardly unusual about Alex, but she was frightening. She contrasted heavily with the scientists in the room. At the same time, she managed to look calm as well as ready to strike. The mood in the office had turned dark.

 

“Catherine Grant, my name is Danvers-Sawyer. Colonel Alexandra Danvers-Sawyer from General John Jones’ office. I’ll be taking over from this point,” Cat, not sure what to make of the news, turned to Lucy, who looked up from the document more stunned than anyone, and nodded.

 

Lena hadn’t heard anything after ‘ten thousand years’. As Cat and the others began asking Alex questions, Lena interrupted them all.

 

“Wait. Ten thousand? I’m sorry but Egyptian civilization didn’t exist until-”

 

“Actually, the sonic and radiocarbon C14 tests are conclusive,” Cisco pointed out, “these artifacts…” he pointed to the artifacts on the worktable, “from associated and overlying strata have been tested to the same era. Besides, they’re clearly Epipaleolithic or Neolithic. Probably related to Nautfian in Palestine, which makes them that old.”

 

Lena, milking them for information, tried another angle, “these are cover stones so there must’ve been a tomb.”

 

“Yeah. Something more than a bunch of bones though,” Caitlin began to explain, but Alex cut in, stepping between them.

 

“Excuse me, Dr. Snow, but that information has officially become classified.”

 

“Cat, what the hell is going on?”

 

Cat gestured for everyone to remain calm. Over her many years on the project, she’d weathered so many storms and endured more setbacks than she could count, so she knew how to take this in stride. She is Cat Grant after all, and she has the skill of compromising her way to exactly what she wants. However, she had a bad feeling about Alex and the way General Jones had sent her here without any prior running, but she could easily guess it had something to do with Lena.

 

“Effective immediately,” Alex announced, “no information will be passed on to non-military personnel.”

 

Lena spluttered, asking, “I just flew here all the way from National City. What is it you want me to do here?”

 

Alex answered smoothly, “you’re a translator. So translate.” She turned to Lucy, “lieutenant, I want all information that doesn’t pertain to these tablets to be removed and brought to my office. Until then, only you can be in this room.”

 

“Your office?” Lucy questioned.

 

“And I’ll need an office,” Alex ordered before leaving the room.

 

Cat was the first to move after Alex’s departure, chasing after the younger woman. That left Lucy with Lena, Caitlin and Cisco.

 

“You can’t be serious about restricting me from information,” she complained, “if I’m going to have any chance of figuring out what this says, I’m going to need information, otherwise why am I here?”

 

Lucy didn’t like this situation any more than Lena. What more could she add? They all heard Alex’s orders. Inwardly, she was angry. General Jones had taken her command and given it to Alex, who had come out of retirement to take her job.

 

Lucy swallowed her pride, “your quarters are over there, directly across the hall. If there is anything you need, Dr. Luthor, don’t hesitate to ask.”

 

“Didn’t you just hear what I said?!” Lena was about to explode, “how am I supposed to decipher this without any information?!”

 

Lucy had no use for being shouted at, but this was the wrong moment to fire back considering the situation, “I have my orders.” She pointed to the door, giving Lena and the others incentive to use it.

 

Lena couldn’t believe this, “do you always follow orders? Always?”

 

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

* * *

 

“Colonel Danvers!”

 

Alex turned on the spot, facing Cat who slowed to a stop, “it’s Danvers-Sawyer, ma’am.”

 

“I don’t care,” Cat snapped, “Lena was approved.”

 

Alex didn’t want to lie, so she kept quiet.

 

Cat sensed as much and asked her point blank, “this doesn’t have anything to do with her, does it? What’s this all about and why did they bring you in?”

 

Alex thought about all the answers she could giver her. After General Jones had read the file on Lena, he had guessed this was their best shot and chose to roll in his heavy guns. Something about Cat, perhaps her fire, made Alex decide to tell her the truth.

 

“I’m here, Cat, in case you succeed.”


	5. Bingo!

Lucy, using both hands to balance a large tray of cafeteria food, used her foot to reach out and grip the door handle. It took her a couple of tries, but eventually, she managed to swing the door open without spilling any food. Inside, Egyptian opera was softly coming out of the speaker system in Lena’s office. Without spilling, Lena pushed backward into the door, entering the room. However, when the door closed, she knew she was in trouble.

 

The lights weren’t on, and the room was dark.

 

Over the last two weeks, Lena had managed to make her office all neat and tidy compared to the cluttered mess it had been left in when she arrived. Lena was a self-proclaimed ‘neat freak’, so every time she got frustrated about not being able to translate the hieroglyphs, instead of taking it out on the room, she would set to work on cleaning it up. Lucy, now really concentrating on not dropping the food, knew better than to try moving around in the dark.

 

“Lena! Hey, Luthor, dinner! Turn on the lights!”

 

The music went dead in mid-crescendo. A moment later, the lights clicked on. In front of the cover stone, the marines had built Lena a two-story scaffold on wheels, so she could study the artifact up close and personal. On the upper plank, all that was visible of the woman was the hand holding a remote control.

 

“Good morning, lieutenant,” came the voice.

 

“It’s almost eight in the afternoon,” Lucy grinned.

 

“What?”

 

“I said it’s almost eight in the afternoon,” Lucy repeated as she brushed away a pile of chip bags off the desk, creating a space for the tray, “is there anything else I can get you?”

 

“Yeah. Could you pick me up a point of reference, and maybe some context,” Lena replied sarcastically, “no, seriously Lucy, just give me ten minutes with the janitor. I’m sure he knows more about what was under this stone than I do.”

 

Lucy sighed a here-we-go-again sigh, “that might be true, but the janitors have clearance.”

 

Lena’s tone got nasty, “look, Lucy, you all want me to solve this puzzle for you. You all want me to decipher this stone that no one else can, yet you refuse to give me enough information to do so.”

 

Lucy didn’t respond.

 

“How about this,” Lena suggested, “what if someone anonymously placed a copy of a report underneath my door? They’d never know who it was. They wouldn’t even know how I got it. I’d just figure it out and we can all go home happy.”

 

“Luthor, do me a favor and get off my back! You know I’m under orders.”

 

Lena sat up on the scaffold, “so disobey them!”

 

Disobey order? If Lena was an enlisted woman, Lucy would have her marching towards the stockade for solitary confinement. But Lena was a civilian, and Lucy had to take it.

 

The soldier shook her head in disgust, “it must be hard to always be the smartest one in the room.” Then, before Lena could respond, Lucy marched straight out of the room, slamming the door.

 

The moment the door closed, Lena started down the scaffold. She had decided that tonight was the night. They weren’t going to lock her in a room with one of the world’s greatest historical discoveries and deny her the crucial information she needed to solve it. She grabbed the empty coffee pot and headed down the hall. From the desk post, the night guard glanced up at Lena.

 

“Everything alright, Doc?”

 

“Never better,” Lena replied, shuffling past the guard to the water supply. Once she was around the corner, Lena broke into a jog. She ran down the hall to Alex’s office. From the pocket of her jeans, she produced a fingernail clipper and went to work on the electronic clipper next to Alex’s door. After she had managed to remove the housing, she turned out the nail-file and laid it across the switching mechanism. Short circuiting, the keypad exploded with a small electric pop. Her heart pounding like a drum, Lena reached for the door handle, opening the door and stepping inside.

 

The office felt about as cozy as a principle’s office.There was an unpadded steel chair behind the large desk. On the desk, Alex’s computer was in screen saver. Lena opened the tall filing cabinets, although they were completely empty. Next to the cabinets was a heavy safe, but knowing her nail clippers were no match, she moved to the desk and sat down. A quick search of the desk offered nothing. There were neatly arranged office supplies and a picture of Alex with Maggie and their son. Had Alex predicted her break in?

 

Down to her last option, Lena hit the space-bar on the keyboard, displaying the computers main menu. She typed in the word **_‘QUERY’_** and the computer lit up with a list of options. She moved down to ‘PERSONNEL’ and typed in **_‘DANVERS-SAWYER, ALEX COLONEL’_**. The screen instantly displayed the following **_‘_ _DANVERS-SAWYER, A. COLONEL - RETIRED TWO YEARS - RETURNED ACTIVE DUTY, ONE MONTH.’_**

 

Strange. What was so important about the cover stones that it caused the military to bring Alex out of retirement? And why her? What was it about Alex that made General Jones think she was qualified for the job?

 

Lena queried the computer a few more times, only to be stopped due to it being **_‘CLASSIFIED’_**. For a mind like Lena’s, one that thrived on fresh information, that word was becoming one of her most hated words. At last, she sunk back and gave up. Tomorrow, they would come to her office and at the very least, fire her. At worst, she didn’t want to think about the legal trouble she might get into. No matter what the Air Force or Marines did to her, she knew that her reputation had just been delivered to the morgue.

 

Sliding the door open quietly, she peered. The coast was clear, but Lena didn’t move. She closed the door again and walked over to the wall. What was Alex doing with a chart of the constellations?

 

“...a million years into the sky…” she stared at the diagram for a long minute, her mind gaining speed, racing like an overheated engine until she was struck with an idea. She literally gasped. Not knowing what else to do, she reached up and tore the chart away from the wall, consequences be damned, and then hurried out of the office. She was halfway back to her office before the closing door light glinted off the empty coffeepot on Alex’s desk

  
The hot white glare of the computer scanner rolled across the tabletop, and over the surface of Alex’s star chart, uploading the scanning of the chart into the computer. Lena was working like a six-armed demon - she was in pure concentration mode. Leaning over the keyboard, she isolated a few of the major constellations, then went into ‘split-screen’ and began comparing them, one by one, to the mystery-glyphs she’d put on the disc. She concentrated her search on Orion, due to it’s visibility from both hemispheres. Two of the symbols were close, but not identical. Lena leaned back and glanced up at her priceless 1400 B.C. statuette.

 

“Am I on the right track?”

 

She said nothing audible, obviously, but Lena bolted up in the chair and typed in new parameters, allowing her to turn the constellations like 3D objects. Almost at once, she found a strong similarity between Orion and one of the mysterious symbols from the outer ring. This same symbol also appeared inside the cartouche at the centre of the stone. However, the fit wasn’t perfect. The lesser stars connected to the star Betelgeuse to form ‘the hunter’s bow’ were absent. And Rigel wasn’t connected to Sirius in the traditional way.

 

Key words being ‘in the traditional way’.

 

Lena stood up, walked across the room to the large bookcase and did something she hadn’t done in years. She consulted the work of Professor Budge. Opening to the appendices in the back, she found another map of the constellations, however different from the first. Grinning now, she sat back down. She looked once more at the screen, then at the book and then into the eyes of her Egyptian statuette.

 

“Bingo!”


	6. The Seventh School

Shortly after dawn, a Cadillac limousine from the runway passed the checkpoint and, moments later, slid to a stop outside the mounds of earth. Several high-ranking officers, hastily gathered from throughout the country, stepped out of the black vehicle and marched across the dirt. At the center of the group, a pace ahead of the others, was a stern man in his early fifties, the breast of his uniform jacket with a collage of medals.

 

This is General John Jones.

 

Respected by all those who served under him and known for being one of few kind military generals. John was famous for three things: always known for making the right decision, treating every one of his soldiers like an equal, rather than beneath him and for being one of the only people willing to stand against General Sam Lane, father of Lucy Lane, who is one of the most discriminatory soldiers in the military.

 

The group strode into the mound and into the chilly insides of the interior. They entered _‘the telephone booth’_ and all stepped into the elevator and made the long trip down.

 

When the doors opened on the twenty-eighth floor, Alex was waiting for them.

 

“Alex, how have you been?” John smiled warmly as he stepped forward, gently shaking Alex’s hand.

 

Alex shook back and lied, “I’ve been good.”

 

John nodded, but he knew it wasn’t true. After Alex’s problems began, he’d started reading every document they had on Alex, including the psychological reports. However, given the delicate situation regarding Alex’s retirement, he didn’t press too much.

 

“How’s Maggie?” the general asked, “my men said she acted a little nervous.”

 

Alex nodded, solemnly, “some days are better than others, but she’s getting there. We both are.”

 

Alex, for her part, had no illusions about why John, an old friend of hers, had called her back. The words the officer had said to her back home still echoed in her mind. She wasn’t being asked back in spite of her condition. Rather because of it.

 

As the group continued their march towards the large conference room, John spoke under his breath, “I’ve got a few things to say that I couldn’t put in the report, Alex.”

 

Lieutenant Lane, a reluctant chaperone, pushed open the door to the conference room. When Lena stepped inside, hands and arms holding up printouts, books and charts, she got an ugly surprise.

 

“Damn it,” she said to no one. She had been expecting a one on one chat with General Jones. This room, however, was filled with military personnel and scientists. She looked around and recognized a few faces. Cisco and Caitlin were there, some of the technicians that she wasn’t allowed to speak to and, of course, Alex.

 

Unlike the other rooms in the base, this room was tastefully decorated, however simply. Most of it was occupied by a large table, surrounded by black chairs.

 

This was not good. If these people were anything like the archaeologists she’d faced in National City, they were going to think her theory was mumbo jumbo. What made it worse, even more so, was that they knew the full story, whereas she was in the dark.

 

She spotted Cat holding court with a cluster of soldiers. She gave Lena a nod, then paddled across the carpet towards her with one of the men in tow.

 

“Lena,” the old woman was glad to see her, “there’s someone I’d like you to meet. This is General John Jones.”

 

Lena, still loaded with documents, was unable to shake his hand, so she replied with, “hi.”

 

“Pleasure to finally meet you. Professor,” John smiled at her, “I read a few of your articles before signing you off on working here.”

 

“Oh yeah?” Lena was surprised, “what’d you think?”

 

“I’ve only got one criticism. Let me put it in military terms,” John began, “you’re so concerned with protecting your flanks that you fail to make your objective. The whole time you’re writing, you’re thinking about what your fellow academics are going to think.”

 

“I’ll take that criticism into account. Thank you, General.”

 

John nodded, turning and yelling to the crowd, “alright everyone! We’ve come a long way to hear this, so let’s get down to business.”

 

Lena went to the front of the room and stood with her back to a wall size whiteboard. She looked around the room, nodding at everyone.

 

“Whenever you’re ready, professor,” John announced, nodding for her to begin.

 

“Okay, so I brought some stuff, some handouts. However, I wasn’t aware there was going to be so many people here so you’ll need to share.”

 

When the room was quiet, her explanation began, “okay, so obviously what we’re looking at is a picture of the cover stones. On the outer track are the symbols which we assumed were words to be translated,” Lena then unfurled the star map she stole from Alex’s office, although she didn’t speak, instead, just giving Lena a raised eyebrow. Lena had the decency to look ashamed, but she continued, circling one of the constellations, “this is Orion. And although drawn slightly differently, it matches the symbol on the tablets. These weren’t fragments of an unknown language, but instead, they’re a catalog of constellations.”

 

“Excuse me, Lena,” began Cisco, “I don’t mean to interrupt, but couldn’t that also be the constellation Bootes? Or Cepheus or Puppis?”

 

Lena smiled, now allowed to show off a little. Rummaging through her documents, she found Budge’s book and explained, “of course the map I’ve put up shows the Greco-Roman style of organizing the stars, but the tablets we want to understand were written earlier, using the Egyptians’ astronomy.” Holding the book up, she answered Cisco’s questions, “in the older system, the stars are connected in a simpler way. I mean, look at Betelgeuse, the brightest star in Orion as it appears on the map. As you can see, it’s identical to the one on the tablets.”

 

She gave the audience a moment to take in the information before continuing.

 

“Now, if I’m right,” Lena went on, “the cartouche that runs down the middle of the central cover stone organizes the constellations into a unique order, forming an address.”

 

“Like coordinates?”

 

“Exactly,” Lena nodded, “the centerpiece holds the key.”

 

Taking a black pen, she drew the symbols vertically down on the whiteboard.

 

“The cartouche is actually is a map. What it gives us are the seven points needed to chart the course to a specific destination.”

 

“Seven points?” John asked.

 

Lena nodded, drawing a 3D cube on the board, then marking each wall of the cube with a dot.

 

“Yes, to find a destination in any three-dimensional space, we need to find two points to determine the height, two for the width and two for the depth,” each time, she drew a line between the dots, giving three intersecting lines, “the cartouche gives us those points.”

 

“You said we need seven but there’s only six. What about the seventh?”

 

“I did, these pinpoint a destination. In order to chart a course, you need a point of origin,” Lena replied.

 

“I hate to bring this up,” Alex piped up, “but there are only six on the cartouche. Where’s the seventh?”

 

“To non-Egyptologists, it would appear that there are only six. However, it takes trained Egyptologists me and Cisco to recognize the seventh symbol. The point of origin isn’t in the cartouche like you would expect. It is, instead, below it,” she gestured to the symbol, “this symbol is the point of origin. It’s a picture of the place the tablet was found,” Lena began to draw the glyph, “you see, it’s two, uh, two of these funny little guys on either side of the pyramid with a sunbeam above. This was an ancient hieroglyph for Earth, and the sunbeam represents the god Ra.”

 

Lena waited for a comment or a question. No one gave on though. Instead, they stared at the drawing, trying to comprehend the consequences of what she told them. Since all of them knew what was buried under the cover stone, aside from Lena, they knew what to do next.

 

Cat spoke up first, “she did it.”

 

For the first time in the conference, Lena was confused, “did what?”

 

Cisco was shaking his head, “there’s no symbol like that on the device though.”

 

The entire room went quiet, with everyone turning to stare at Cisco, who meekly shrunk in his seat. Lena was staring right at Cisco.

 

“Device?” she asked, “what device?”

 

Caitlin winced. Cisco had just violated the order about giving information to Lena. Cisco glanced over to Lucy, who was giving him the dirtiest look imaginable.

 

Cat instantly stood up, using the reveal to her advantage, “I imagine you’ll have to show her now, considering she’s the only one who can identify it.”

 

John didn’t hesitate in nodding, “she should’ve been told from the beginning. Show her.”

 

Alex nodded to Lucy, who walked over to the back wall and, folding back a panel, revealed a lever. She pulled it down, and the entire wall began to descend, revealing a large bay window that looked down into a larger room below. Even before she came to the window to see the room’s contents, Lena suddenly understood how large the base really was. The whole maze of offices, complete with a canteen, that had seemed so big was only a small percentage of the total space.

 

The floor of the base was jammed with machinery, clearly an extremely high tech operation. However, it wasn’t this machinery that caught Lena’s eye. At the centre of the room, held up by clamps bolted into the wall was the large metal ring discovered by Cat and her father all those years ago. In front of it was a steel ramp, leading directly into the ring.

 

“What the hell is this?” was the only question Lena could ask.

 

“That, Lena, is your Stargate,” Cat replied.

 

Lena’s mind went blank. The thick ring, more than three times her height, was cleaned and polished. There was no mistaking the material for metal, although Lena didn’t know what kind it could be.

 

“You found this thing in Egypt?” Lena couldn’t believe it.

 

She wanted to ask more questions, but John interrupted her, “take her downstairs and see if she can identify the remaining symbol,” Alex went to move, but John added, “not you Alex. We need to talk.”

 

Cat lead Lena and a dozen other spectators down a winding staircase and into the computer room, where a handful of technicians who maintained a 24/7 surveillance became confused by the sudden intrusion.

 

The darkened room struck Lena as a miniature ‘Mission Control’. It started to dawn on her that this is what the whole project was leaning towards. Most of the onlookers crowded around the observation window. Lena went to follow, but Cat pulled her over to a computer screen that showed a close up shot of the ring. The camera was fixed on the section of the ring where the symbol for Scorpio was engraved into the surface.

 

The camera brought Lena close enough to appreciate the detailed carving work that had gone into the ring. She could also see one of the nine triangular chevrons anchored to the ring’s outer edge. Made of gold, each of them housed a chunk of quartz.

 

“Even though we didn’t realize the symbols on the cover stones were constellations, we knew they matched those on the device. Our problem was that we didn’t know about the seventh symbol. Now, let’s see if you can find it,” Cat explained. She called over a technician, who entered a series of commands. Instantly, the inner part of the Stargate began to turn like a wheel inside the larger ring. At the base, underneath the ramp, a mechanical apparatus had been fitted in, using motorized rubber wheels to turn the wheel. One by one, the symbols moved across the screen, showing constellations like Libra, Bootes, Virgo and Crater.

 

Lena startled them all by yelling, “hold it!”

 

She leaned forward and stared at the image for several seconds.

 

A triangle with a circle on top.

 

Slowly, she lifted her black pen, to the technician’s dismay, and drew the missing characters from the cartouche’s symbol directly on the monitor.

 

“It’s Earth!” Caitlin exclaimed.

 

“How could we miss that?” Cisco looked annoyed with himself, “it was in front of us the entire time.”

 

For Cat, everything was suddenly clear. She charged to the back of the room, activating the intercom and spoke in a hushed tone to John one floor above. When she returned, she issued the order.

 

“Run the test.”

 

Like a magic spell, those words transformed the booth into a madhouse of activity. A soldier with a clipboard yelled orders, technicians scrambled to their stations and a large bank of printers began printing reading’s of the gates activity.

 

“Let’s do it.”

 

The technician in front of Lena and Cat, his name is Mitch, pecked at the keyboard, entering a large set of instructions before pressing enter. The very next second, the inner wheel rotated until the Taurus constellation was at the top, underneath the middle chevron, which was the seventh. Like a combination lock, the chevron dropped down with a loud click, separating in half before returning back to its place. As it did so, the first chevron to the right lit up.

 

“Chevron one, locked,” Mitch announced.

 

The wheel then reversed in direction until the second needed symbol, Serpens Caput, was at the top. The motion was repeated, with the second chevron lighting up. As it did so, a low hum began to fill the room, growing, causing everything to tremble slightly.

 

“Chevron two, locked.”

 

As each piece of the address was steered up to the top of the gate, the mood in the room grew tense. Lena silently called the names of the constellations as every chevron got locked in placed: Taurus, Serpens Caput, Capricornus, Monocerus, Sagittarius and Orion.

 

Once Orion was locked in place, the wheel had to spin all the way around again to reach the final symbol, increasing the tension in the room as well as the pitch of the humming sound.

 

“This is as far as we’ve ever been able to get,” Cat’s voice broke Lena out of her fascination.

 

“How did you know what it could do?”

 

“The ring itself,” Cat started, “is made out of a quartz-like element unlike anything found on Earth-”

 

Before Cat could finish though, Mitch’s voice called out the sentence everyone was desperate to hear.

 

“Chevron seven is locked on!”

 

As soon as the top chevron locked in place and lit up, finally lighting up all seven chevrons, with the two on the bottom underneath the ramp untouched, the shaking in the room dropped away, including the hum, which dropped to the lowest pitch it could be. Lena looked at Cat, her eyes asking if this was supposed to happen.

 

Before Cat could answer, a second ‘note’, higher than the first, came pealing through the window. The sound had a weird effect on Lena, as well as everyone else, but Lena wanted to ask a question.

 

“Shh,” Cat cut her off, “listen to it.”

 

Lena listened as a third note sounded, and a third, and a fourth, each one at a higher frequency. The strange thing, Lena couldn’t help but notice, was that each note was so distinct from the others even though they blended together.

 

Then something stranger happened. In a flash of bright light, some form of liquid shot out of the rim of the inner ring, meeting in the center. Like a stone being dropped into the water, the liquid burst out, making everyone jump back in surprise, and the rooms filled with loud splashing sound. The burst stood horizontal, defying the laws of physics, before shooting back into the ring, forming a constant pool of rippling liquid whilst out the back of the ring, the liquid created a whirlpool, spiraling on thin air.

 

Every computer in the booth was lit up like a Christmas tree, pouring out information.

 

Cat yelled at the nearest people at the window, asking whether the people surrounding the Gate were alright. Fortunately, they were.

 

“It’s guiding itself!” shouted one of the many technicians.

 

Caitlin rushed over to a large glass map of the stars, where a mechanical device was strapped to it. A small crosshair, projected by the device, trekked across the glass, leaving the Earth mark and travelling through the galaxy until it stopped at the far end of the screen.

 

Caitlin, wide-eyed, shouted to Cat, “it’s locked onto a point in the Cirrian galaxy. It’s got mass. Could be a moon or something, maybe a large asteroid.”

 

“Did you say Cirrian?” Lena scratched her head, “isn’t that…?”

 

“On the other side of the known universe? Yes,” Cat was clearly enjoying the moment.

 

The phone rang, and Mitch snapped it up quickly. It was John calling down. As the technician listened, the expression on his face slowly became one of disbelief, “you what?” he asked incredulously, but the next moment, his tone of voice changed, “yes sir.”

 

“What is it?”

 

“They want us to send a probe through,” Mitch explained, eyes wide.

 

“A probe?” Cat had no idea what John was asking for. She was about to get back on the phone when through the window, she saw soldiers wheeling in a large probe, outfitted with a mechanical arm. While the probe was being readied, a squad of eight or nine heavily armed soldiers took up defensive positions around the Stargate. Lena scoffed. Who could they be expecting to break in?

 

The technicians finished setting up the probe, and scurried away from the device when it started moving up the ramp, heading towards the puddle.

 

“Isn’t it just going to hit the wall?” Lena asked.

 

“It shouldn’t,” Cat smirked.

 

Lena moved several steps toward the back of the booth just in case she was wrong. When the probe came to the top of the ramp and pierced the puddle, there was an audible power surge. Just as the first atoms of the machine were being sucked into the puddle, the body of the machine was swallowed up by the energy field and a white light flared out into every corner of the room. Within seconds, the entire probe had disappeared through the gate.

 

Lena, dumbstruck, astonished and dazzled, turned to Cat for an explanation.

 

The older woman simply smirked, “well, it’s starting to get exciting now, isn’t it?”

 

“What _is_ happening now?”

 

“We’re waiting to see if it can send its data back through,” Cisco piped up. They waited for a minute, but nothing happened. Lena whispered to Cat.

 

“How long have you been working on this?”

 

Cat smiled fondly, “my father found this near Giza in 1969. I was just a child. But the Egyptian government didn’t release it until a few years later. And then we had to get it from the British, and it took forever to get our financing.”

 

“From the pentagon?”

 

Cat nodded, “I’ve been involved with this project since I was a little girl. It took me decades to find the money and without it, this would’ve been put away in storage to collect dust. I did what I had to do.”

 

“Something’s coming in!” Cisco yelled, monitoring the inflow of data, watching as the signal started to die, “we’re losing it!”

 

When Cisco pronounced the signal dead, the inner ring of the gate turned on its own and shut down.

 

Cat joined most of the other technicians crowded around Cisco’s computer. Lena leaned over and asked what’s happening.

 

“The probe,” Cisco explained, “was sending us data, but it’s all compressed and encrypted. It’ll take a few minutes to unpack and decode.”

 

While a cluster of technicians led by Caitlin crowded around a bank of computers at the back of the room, the mood of anticipation was so high.

 

“We got it!”

 

Now the room went crazy. Everyone started cheering and shaking their fists in triumph. The entire science staff started hugging each other. Suddenly, they were in control of data about a piece on the far side of the universe. After months of working in this base, the most exciting part was starting. Cisco approached Lena and shook her hand excitedly, thanking her.

 

Caitlin approached Lena afterwards, and unlike Cisco, she pulled Lena in for a hug, much to her surprise, “congrats. You were amazing.”

 

Lena smiled and returned the compliments. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d seen a group of Ph.Ds this happy. As the celebration continued, she found Cat and spoke.

 

“You’re planning on going through?”

 

“That’s exactly what this is all about.”

 

As she was speaking these words, a group of soldiers entered the room and took up positions around the computers. Two soldiers walked through and started removing hard drives and notebooks, including the recently collected data. At first, many of the celebrants didn’t notice, but the soldiers attitudes made it clear that they weren’t sent to open champagne.

 

“What’s going on here?” Caitlin demanded, “what is this?”

 

The intercom rang in response. Cat rushed to answer. After a moment, she yelled at the top of her lungs.

 

“QUIET! EVERYONE!” she went back to her conversation with the higher ups. She must have said ‘I understand’ a dozen times, her expression dying every time. Now everyone was quiet, concerned. She hung up and faced the room.

 

“The general says he is very pleased with our work and that we should all be proud of what we’ve done.”

 

Everyone started to smile again.

 

“He also said we’re all fired. And they’ll be taking over from here.”


	7. Military Intelligence

Lena didn’t stay to hear the screaming. In a flash, she was upstairs marching through the corridors, looking for General Jones. Instead, she caught Alex coming out of the conference room.

 

“Just what do you think you’re doing?!” Lena demanded, “is this the Army’s idea of loyalty? You hire all these people, keep them here for months and when they finally get somewhere, just when things get exciting, you fire them?”

 

Alex hardly heard what Lena had said. She had too much on her mind after her meeting with John, and besides, she didn’t really care one way or another about the scientists. All she wanted to do was get back to her office.

 

“Doctor Luthor,” Alex said, trying to calm her down, “thank you for your contribution to the mission. When there’s more to report, we’ll contact you.”

 

Lena frowned, “hold on a second…” her eyes widened in realization, “you said mission… you’re going through, aren’t you?”

 

Alex internally berated herself, firing Lena a look that screamed ‘back off’, “all pertinent information will be released at the right time.”

 

“And who’s going to make that decision?” Lena asked, “is it the pentagon?”

 

“Military intelligence,” Alex answered.

 

“Now there’s a contradiction in terms,” Lena chuckled sarcastically.

 

“You don’t know how right you are,” Alex muttered, continuing down the hall.

 

“Do you really think you’ll be able to keep this quiet? I’ll bet the scientific community would want to know about all this.”

 

That wasn’t something Alex could ignore. She wheeled around and moved carefully back towards Lena. There was something incredibly menacing about Alex that made Lena’s throat go dry.

 

“Who’s going to tell them? Everyone else has signed non-disclosure agreements except for you,” coming toe-to-toe with Lena, Alex asked with mock courtesy, “are you going to tell them, Professor Luthor?”

 

Inwardly, Lena was terrified, and she struggled to remain calm on the outside. Something about Alex told her that she could kill you eight different ways with one finger. Not only that she could, but in the right circumstances that she would. Refusing to be intimidated, Lena fired back.

 

“If I have to, then yes.”

 

“Go ahead,” Alex sneered, “but do yourself a favor. When you’re on that bus back home tomorrow and you stop off to pick up some of that crap vegan food you’re always eating, grab the recent copy of _The National Inquirer_  and read the story about the alien baby born with the head of a frog and the body of a man, and when you’ve finished reading, ask yourself if you believe it.”

 

Lena thought for a moment about how she could prove to the world that the U.S. military had an alien device capable of travelling you across the known universe that was discovered buried in Giza that was hidden inside a Nevadan nuclear bunker. Before Alex had gotten to the point of her story, Lena knew there wasn’t a point. No one would believe her, especially because it’s __her__.

 

Alex smirked, “is there anything else, Professor?”

 

Lena thought for a moment before trying something else, “fine, then keep me on this mission. I’ve spent most of my life studying languages, ancient Egypt, archaeology, all of the things this project is about.”

 

“I appreciate that,” Alex replied, “but the decision has been made.”

 

Lena was pissed, “I’ve gambled my reputation and dedicated my life to this profession. What have you dedicated __your__ life to, General?”

 

Alex started to answer, fury building, but caught herself. She gave Lena a cold stare and said, “with all due respect, _ma’am_ , pack your bags and get the hell off this base.”

 

“Hold on Alex. I think we’re going to need her.”

 

Both Alex and Lena spun to see John leaning out of the door of the conference room. He waved both women into the room.

 

When Lucy hit the lights two minutes later, Lena and Alex were sitting next to each other in the dark watching the TV. John had ordered the to sit down and study the imagery the probe had beamed back through the Stargate. The camera panned across the surface of a large interior column and kept turning until it showed the illuminated ring of another Stargate.

 

“Freeze and enhance,” John commanded.

 

The general’s assistant was stationed at the disk player. A communications technology specialist, he corrected the image and then zoomed in on the ring. Fascinated, Lena stood and walked to the screen.

 

“The markings are different!”

 

“That’s why I wanted you to see this,” said the general.

 

The assistant narrated over the images, “the readouts tell us it’s an atmospheric match.”

 

John walked over and stood in front of the screen. He spoke directly to Lena, “we’re planning a short reconnaissance mission. Nothing fancy. Survey the area inside a quarter-mile perimeter, gather information and bring it home. Once you’re on the other side, you’ll need to decipher the signs on the Gate and dial home. But here’s the thing… I’m not going to launch a mission and send my soldiers over unless I’m sure I can bring them back. So the question is, can you do it?”

 

Lena had another idea, “why not try re-establishing a wormhole from this side.”

 

Alex spoke up for the first time in the meeting, “because once our team goes through, the base will be evacuated and sealed. We don’t know what might come through from the other side.”

 

Now Lena understood not only why the soldiers had surrounded the Gate during its activation, but why this was all happening in a subterranean base. Lena looked up at the ceiling. Every fiber of her body is telling her to say yes, to promise the general anything he wanted to hear in exchange for being able to visit a planet on the other side of the universe. It was like her whole life was leading to this moment, the moment where she would embark on a voyage, potentially dangerous at that, to an unknown planet. If she didn’t go, the story of her life would make no sense. But what of the others? She looked at Alex and Lucy. How could she put their lives at risk to satisfy her curiosity. Her moment may have arrived, but the stakes were too high.

 

She looked at John, who raised his eyebrows.

 

“Yes. I can do it,” she said with resolve.

 

“Are you sure?”

 

“Positive.”

 

John nodded, looking at each of the soldiers in the room one by one. When they all signaled their agreement, John decided, “fine. You’re on the team. You leave tomorrow at o-six hundred hours.”

* * *

 

Alex, deep in concentration, sat motionless on a folding chair, a dim light bulb overhead. She was studying the nine-foot long section of earth taken from directly below the gate by CatCo. The pair of fossilized human bodies had been fused into the rock over ten thousand years ago. The muscular corpses were almost perfectly preserved. The only damage came where the long scepters they carried had been chipped loose and taken away for testing, and several perforations in the bodies where scientists had taken DNA samples. However, the twisted metallic skulls held Alex’s attention.

 

Since she’d arrived and taken over the project, Alex had spent ages in the dark room, staring at the artifact. It was the only way she had to prepare for what might still be on the other side of the gate. Less than twenty-four hours remained before she would lead her team through the gate.

 

It wasn’t a good mission. The probe had made it through, but technically, there was no proof that they would make the trip. Even if they encountered no enemies, the chances of coming back from this were remote at best. And Alex’s chances were slimmer still. Not only had General Jones given her what amounted to a suicide mission, but Alex truthfully had no intentions of making it back.

 

For the past two years, Alex had wanted nothing more than to die. She had become a zombie, exhausted, broken, empty in every possible way. More than once, she’d loaded a pistol and wedged her thumb backward across the trigger, something that Maggie knew nothing about, but she refused to do it. It would have killed Maggie.

 

Coming from a woman who had been responsible for so much death and violence in her life, the refusal to take her own was truly ironic. The black sheep of her family, Alex was born with wildness in her heart, despite coming from a family of well respected scientists. By the time she was eighteen years old Alex was brought before the court for the third time, this time for drunk driving. She had been sitting inside her cell when General Jones approached her and offered her a place in the U.S. military.

 

She chose the Marine Corps from her very first day. She proved herself to be an exceptionally disciplined and gifted soldier. After only twenty two weeks, she had applied for and won a transfer to the combat development training facility in Gotham City. There, she was taught the finer points of infiltrating the enemies territory, wilderness survival, assassination and manufacturing and detonating explosives. She rose quickly, being promoted to the elite Jump Two Company. Everything was going fine until she started going out on ‘house calls’, which was usually political killings that never made the papers. That was when Alex found out two important things about herself. She was a talented assassin who hated herself deeply for killing, especially when she knew they were innocent. She never complained, never even flinched. She buried her conscience and fell in love with drinking. She stopped feeling all together, only coming to life when she went into action. For seven years, everything that was alive in her sunk deeper to the bottom. On the outside, she was a warrior who let actions speak louder than words. Inside, she as vacant.

 

And that was when she met Maggie.

 

She was a detective for National City police and had met the detective at a crime scene. They became good friends at first, but soon one thing lead to another, although none of their friends really understood what someone so lively like her saw in the withdrawn young soldier like Alex. She found Alex fascinating, and she made Alex laugh. They started seeing each other every day and two years later, Alex had asked her to marry her. One year later, the married couple adopted a little boy named Jamie.

* * *

 

By the time John found her sitting in the dimly lit room, Alex had been there for half an hour staring at the figures. Alex theorized that when the gate was buried in stone, the two creatures had tried to come through.

 

She didn’t look up when the door slid open. She didn’t need to, she knew John would come looking for her.

 

“Our people tell me they used to be alive,” John said, walking over to the limestone slab.

 

“No offence John but I thought I was doing this alone,” she said at last.

 

John sighed, looking at the woman with pity, “and you will. As soon as the team completes their survey and comes home, you’ll be on your own.”

 

Alex was resigned to her orders, but gave her opinion, “the more people we send through, the greater the chances something’s going to go wrong. Plus, Lena could be a problem. She’s smart. She won’t go along with this plan if she figures it out.”

 

“Then it’s your job to make sure she doesn’t.”

 

They both stare at the twisted shapes a moment before Alex said, “general, you’ve opened up a doorway to a world we know nothing about.”

* * *

 

All afternoon and well into the evening, the corridors of the base’s office complex resembled a college dormitory on the day after final exams. All the doors were open and crates of books and trunks of belongings littered the hallways where the departing residents said their goodbyes. A few were discussing ways to get back on the project, but most were simply sad to be leaving and uncertain about what happens next. Because she was such a wildcard to begin with, no one thought it strange that Lena wasn’t fast enough to make the last shuttle off the complex. Then, after Caitlin and Cisco had said their goodbyes, Lena shut her door and started to get ready.

 

Lucy had issued her a set of combat fatigues. She was doing up the last button when the door opened.

 

It was Cat. She looked tired, “I thought you didn’t like to travel.”

 

“I got over it,” it was good to see her. Lena had worried what Cat would think when she heard she was part of the mission. She hadn’t known her long, but she liked and respected Cat a great deal and wouldn’t have betrayed her, “I’ve been thinking about what I said down in the booth. About taking the money from the military. Look, I’m sorry if it-”

 

“That isn’t important now,” Cat interrupted her, “this is.” She stood up, came across the room and looked Lena in the eyes, “the first time I saw that ring being dragged out of the ground in Egypt, I knew something like this would happen. That there would be some incredible journey to be taken. And, naturally, I thought I would be the one to take it. But, I’m no longer a young woman, so it’s going to be you instead.”

 

Lena started to say something, but Cat cut her off again, “I’m glad. If it can’t be me, I want it to be you.

 

She reached up behind her neck and removed the medallion Lena had always seen her wear, “this was found with the gate,” she told her, “it always brought me luck.”

 

Lena took the bronze disk and turned it over, inspecting it, “this is the Eye of Ra and it’s a rare piece. I can’t accept it.”

 

“Yes you can,” Cat replied, “bring it back to me.”

 

“Wait a second,” Lena hurried over to her computer and picked up the ancient figurine, “this is from the fourteenth century B.C. Take care of her for me.”

 

Cat accepted the statuette and headed to the door, turning to Lena at the last moment.

 

“Good luck.”


	8. The Evacuation

The away team was scheduled to rendezvous outside the base at 5:45 am. Lucy, responsible for the final equipment check and issuing last minute instructions arrived early and found, to her surprise, Lena sitting in the hallway reading a large book on Egyptology. Too nervous to sleep, she’d spent most of the night pouring over the most ancient hieroglyphs she could find, memorizing as much as she could. Scattered around her on the floor was an hour’s worth of material.

 

“Lena, this isn’t a library. Clean this up.”

 

Lucy, keyed-up and combat-ready expected Lena to jump when she gave the order. Lena, on the other hand, had no intention of taking orders. She looked up at the lieutenant, saying nothing. Lena, pissed off, decided not to argue. She tossed Lena a big envelope and went on to her next task.

 

The envelope contained five granola bars with a note from Cat reading, __‘_ Didn’t I promise you lunch?’._ Two more soldiers reported to Lucy. They were Susan Vasquez and John Diggle, faces Lena remembered from the morning she drove onto the base. Vasquez was a short woman with short black hair. She was strangely calm, despite the nature of the mission, with her hands clasped behind her back. She seemed to be good friends with Diggle, who was very similar, attitude wise. He stood with the same posture as the soldier next to him. Lena couldn’t have guessed from looking at Diggle that he was an accomplished physicist. In fact, Lena couldn’t learn much of anything about either of them, due to the fact they had closed ranks and were determined to give her the cold shoulder. The rumor running around the base was that Lena was a civilian with political connections who had gone over the heads of Alex and and General Jones, forcing her way onto the squad. Her famous family didn’t help matters either. No self-respecting solider was going to fraternize with her. The unspoken plan seemed to be making her life as hard as possible.

 

Lena took the clue and continued reading. At 5:44 and 45 seconds, Alex turned the corner. She drew extra attention because she was wearing a neat long sleeve black uniform, outfitted with body armor with holsters strapped to her waist. Six soldiers snapped into an inspection line offering the colonel a quick salute. Lena, the seventh, moved into place at the end of the line, vaguely trying to fit in.

 

Alex, serious, asked the assembly a single question, “does anyone want to say something before we leave?”

 

There was no reply.

 

“All right, then. Move out,” and Alex pushed through the doors leading into the booth.

 

Unlike the day before, when the booth had a technician for every monitor, this morning there were only two men inside. The rest of the science team had either been evacuated or were in the process of going. General Jones wasn’t kidding, he wanted the base completely sealed before the away team was through the gate.

 

With a nod, Alex signaled that they were ready. Speaking into a microphone so the remaining workers in the base could hear, one of the technicians made the announcement, “initiating the commencement sequence.”

 

As the away squad trooped past him. The technician eyed the last person in line, Lena. The technician felt, as did most of the scientists, that while he was glad that one of them was going along, he wished it didn’t have to be Lena, the woman who came to the project late. Thus, it was with mixed emotions that the technician offered Lena the thumbs up signal as she walked past.

 

The squad entered the large room and gathered at the base of the ramp that led up to the Stargate.

 

“Permanent cameras on,” called a voice over the speakers.

 

Lena licked her lips and tried to swallow, realizing her mouth had gone completely dry. Was she really going to go through wit this? She knew the probe had arrived intact, but she wasn’t made out of metal. What if it went wrong? What if the gate couldn’t reassemble personalities?

 

From this angle, the ring looked even bigger. The entire group stood still and silent as the technicians made some final adjustments. Then the technician’s voice came over the speakers, booming through the room, calling out the coordinates. ‘Left 11.329,’ and then after the ring had spun up to the section showing Taurus, ‘Right 148.002,’ spinning Serpens Caput up to the ‘register clamp.’ Lena felt her stomach rise to her throat as the harmonics began to issue from the ring. As the seventh symbol was wheeled to the top, and the rumbling sound coming from the ring shook everything in the room, the group stepped well away from the ring. A moment later, the ring flashed a bright white and violently shot out the water like energy into the room. It hovered for a split second before being vacuumed back through the ring and out the other side. Now the deafening roar quieted as the Stargate began cycling through its harmonic progression.

 

The technicians rolled a pushcart loaded with equipment into place at the bottom of the ramp. Alex gestured to Lucy and one other solider. The two went to the cart and steered it up the ramp, putting them only a few feet away from the gaping mouth of the ring. Everything was ready.

 

One of the technicians approached Alex and pointed towards the cart saying something to her that Lena couldn’t hear. Alex nodded and shook the man’s hand. Then both technicians jogged for the security doors, which locked down behind them.

 

“Initiating the final sequence.”

 

Alex turned to look up into the big observation window of the conference room. Lena followed her glance up and saw General Jones pick up the telephone that went through to the speakers.

 

“Final evacuation,” he said, and approached the bay window. Looking down on the men, he offered them a simple nod, then turned for the exit as the window’s shielding wall slowly slid closed.

 

The soldiers at the top of the ramp had their eyes locked onto Alex, who gave the order to go with one finger. Using the hand held remote control, Diggle sent the equipment through the energy field. The cart slowly tipped into the puddle, rippling the field before slowly disappearing. Alex walked at a casual, even pace into the pool. For a moment she seemed suspended in mid-stride before taking one last step, disappearing through the puddle.

 

Lucy ordered the next soldier, Price, across the last ten feet of ramp. The soldier, nervous, tried to edge into the force field. He did so, painstakingly slow, and disappeared.

 

One by one, Lucy commanded the soldiers up the ramp. Vasquez disappeared, and then Diggle. Now only Lena and Lucy were left. The lieutenant signaled to Lena that she would go last.

 

“No hesitation, Luthor!” Lucy shouted. Then, she jogged up the ramp, leaping into the center of the ring.

 

Lena walked tentatively up the ramp until she was inches away from the turbulent light.

 

A deep hollow clapping sound filled the room, the sound of the giant concrete doors closing high above her, the echo bouncing down the base walls. Like a young pharaoh sealed inside her pyramid, Lena was now the only soul left in this huge structure. She shut her eyes and inched forward.


	9. The Other Side of the Gate

Lena hasn’t always been big on physical exercise. She would go for the occasional jog and even went to the gym every now and then, but most of her free time was spent in a library or in her home reading books on Egyptology. However, she liked to think that her occasional attempts to exercise are what prepared her for the trip she was about to take through the Stargate.

 

As soon as her eyes touched the bright surface of the threshold, she saw the base’s wall speeding towards her like a falling house. Much too fast for her to react. By the time she flinched, she was well out of Earth’s atmosphere, accelerating through the vacuum of space. She felt herself glide for a second until a wrinkle in the energy field threw her end over end. No gravity, no control, no sense of up or down, only the sudden bruising glances off what felt like the walls of a tunnel.

 

Shooting past a cluster of what appeared to be new stars, there was a long flesh of light, enough time to see her legs elongated, stretched miles out in front of her until they snagged and her head came whipping past, as she sailed toward a face-first collision with a gigantic planet. Her scream wouldn’t sound. She hit the surface and zoomed out the other side, crashing again into the electric burn of the walls, spinning through a vacuum of light and sound. Then arriving.

 

Lena came through in pieces. The toe of her right boot came first. Then her left hand. The tip of her nose spread out to become her still wincing face. For a split second the pieces dangled in the light at the bottom edge of the Stargate until more molecules came to fill the gaps.

 

When Lena was whole once more, the ring spat her out onto the hard floor like unwanted luggage, covered in frost. Later, she surmised that the frost was a by-product of her molecular reconstruction, the Stargate chilled its cargo by packing the molecules tightly at the moment of reconstruction. For less than 1/100th of a second, the atoms of Lena’s body were squeezed together at a rate of zero movement, long enough for her to be coated in a thin layer of ice.

 

Freezing and completely disorientated, she was unable to control her fall. She fell out of the ring and hit the floor hard, but not as hard as she would’ve if she’d gone through first. The entire team lay in a pile on the stairs at the base of the gate, spilling off the top of the equipment cart. It was several seconds before the first of them, Lucy, was able to shake off the dizziness and sit up. When she could focus again, she glanced around the room at what looked like a massacre. Right next to her, curled up like an icy newborn, was Lena, a pond of vomit near her head.

 

When Lena found she couldn’t breathe, her first impulse was to claw her way back into the gate and get back to Earth’s oxygen before she suffocated. That’s when she felt a pair of hands close around her arms. Panicked, she tried to fight back.

 

“Luthor, you alright?” it was Lucy hoisting Lena into a sitting position and then pulling her arms above her head. She started breathing again. When the first cool breath of the new atmosphere hit her lungs, the sting opened her eyes and she began to cough.

 

The passage through the ring had knocked the wind out of her. When Lucy was satisfied that Lena was okay, she went to check on the next soldier. The chill from the frost deepened into Lena’s skin. She shuddered and felt like needles were stabbing her everywhere.

 

Remembering who and where she was, she squinted away from the bright light pouring out of this second Stargate, nearly identical to the first, and saw the luminous outlines of the others, scattered around her in different states of recovery.

 

The trip through hadn’t been what she expected. Not that she assumed it would some ‘beam me up Scotty’ experience, but neither had she expected to feel like she had gone rounds with Mike Tyson.

* * *

 

“Everyone okay?” Lucy asked.

 

The soldiers, dazed and disorientated, grumbled in the affirmative until Vasquez joked sarcastically, “that was a rush, lets totally do that again.”

 

It was painful to laugh. One by one they sat up or, if they could, got to their feet. Still coughing and shivering from the cold, they gathered at the equipment cart. As Alex started issuing instructions, the inner ring of the Stargate began to spin again, before suddenly stopping with a click, shutting itself off and plunging the room into darkness.

 

Alex’s voice cut through the darkness, “alright guys. Let’s go to work. Phase one. Just the essentials.”

 

With a sharp crack, Alex cracked open a flare that spluttered to life, hissing a red light into the room. With choreographed precision, the team began to off-load only the equipment they needed for their first reconnaissance mission. Lucy broke open a second flare, whilst Lena watched as Diggle expertly assembled a specially built video camera and Roy mounted a miniature radar dish to the top of a backpack-size unit for the collection of technical data. While the soldiers continued to prepare, Lena waded beyond the murky pool of light to the nearest wall in search of clues.

 

The room was a tall black marble box. Lena inched forward until she found the wall, then ran her hands over the polished surface. Although the large stones were beautifully cut and set, there was no trace of writing anywhere. Lena moved deeper into the shadows, reading the empty walls by Braille.

 

The team was strapping into their equipment, ready to roll. Vasquez, Valdes and Roy switched on powerful flashlights, the beams intersecting in the dark air as they scanned the room. The soldiers gathered at the large doorway, the only way in or out of the room. Alex thrust her flare around the corner peering into the next room. It was a short stone hallway.

 

Everything seemed clear, so she gave Hix the sign to switch on the intense light at the head of his camera. Then she turned and pointed.

 

“Vasquez, you take point. First team, move.”

 

Swinging her rifle up to patrol position, Vasquez stepped through the threshold into the dark corridor followed by Diggle and another solider.

 

“Lucy, you and Hix cover the rear. Harper, you and me. Let’s go.” They, too, bolted into the hallway.

 

Lucy looked around like she’d lost something. With a muted growl, she said, “Lena, let’s go.” Lena snapped away from her investigation of the wall and trotted through the doorway.

 

After a few yards, the hallway widened into a larger area that resembled the apse of a cathedral. By that time, Lena had caught up to Hix. Noticing something, she reached out and grabbed the nose of the camera, directing its light down to the floor. She and Hix were standing at the edge of a circle twelve feet in diameter. It appeared to be a metallic disk, probably made of copper, that had been carefully set into the surface of the floor. Hix looked at Lena and shrugged. Two steps later, Lena had another idea and grabbed the camera once more, this time directing its light straight up. Sure enough, an identical disk was cut into the ceiling directly above the first. Lena stood gazing at the ceiling until Hix, annoyed and not wanting to fall behind, shook loose and move forward. By that point, Lena was pretty certain those disks weren’t made of copper.

 

Picking their way carefully through the dark hallway, alert to any sign of danger, the team came to the Grand Gallery. This vast chamber was designed in a monumental architectural style and finished with polished facing stones. For some reason, it began to feel vaguely familiar to Lena. Along the walls, towering ornamental columns rose up to support the stone roof. They were moving uphill now. The floor of the immense gallery was built at a gently rising angle. Even Alex was impressed with the chamber, but not enough to distract her from finding an exit. The team moved up the floor of the Grand Gallery, dwarfed by its size.

 

The team’s flashlights revealed the dim outline of a steep ramp at the end of the Grand Gallery that climbed up to yet another chamber. With no responsibility other than to look around, Lena was doing just that. While the soldiers, armed to their teeth, were anticipating combat, Lena felt like she’d been transported to an archaeological nirvana. At the same time, she couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that she knew this place. It wasn’t deja vu. She just couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

 

When Vasquez was alone at the top of the ramp, she suddenly squatted down. The movement set off a chain reaction as each member of the team hit the deck. Before Lena knew what had happened, Hix had cut the light on his camera and dropped to the floor. All eyes were glued to Vasquez, who lifted up just high enough to study the contents of the next room. Without turning around, she gave the come ahead signal. Lena started to go until Hix grabbed her by the ankle.

 

“Not you. Stay down.”

 

Alex sprinted silently to the base of the ramp then crabbed up the incline to Vasquez’s position. After conferring for a moment, Alex signaled the team to approach. Lena checked with Hix and got the go ahead. By the time the team gathered on the ramp, they could see that Vasquez was already deep into the next room. It was some sort of Entrance Hall. There was light at the end of this room, sunlight. The hall, another large boxy room, was punctuated every few yards by huge stone pillars.

 

The team watched Vasquez dart from one of these pillars to the next until she was in position to see where the light was coming from. She turned and gave the group a thumbs up. Alex responded by sending two more soldiers into the hallway to meet Vasquez. When she was convinced the area was secure, the rest of the squad came forward.

 

When the team converged in the hall. Alex conferred with Diggle, who had already taken atmospheric readings.

 

“Conditions are similar to inside. Radiation, electromagnetic and other exposures indicate normal.” Alex listened to Diggle’s report before poking her head around the corner and studying the last hallway. Satisfied with what she saw, she turned back to the squad and pointed again to Diggle and Vasquez, who immediately turned and went. Moving one pillar at a time, the team advanced towards the huge square doorway and the sharp daylight beyond. A few strides before the threshold, Alex lifted a hand in the air, stopping the team. Without turning back, she signaled a soldier to either side of the doorway, twenty feet wide. When they’d peered outside and given the all clear, Alex took the last steps forward and leaned out to check the area above the doorway. Then and only then did she lead the way out into the sun for their first look at this new world.

 

The team came out onto a long stone pier that extended into an ocean of sand. They could barely believe their eyes as they saw nothing but lifeless brown sand dunes stretching away in every direction under an intensely blue sky. Down at the end of the platform, forty yards away, stood a pair of obelisks half buried in the loose sand. The team gazed around at this arid brown world, each one lost in their own thoughts. Except for a hot breeze there was no movement, no sound. No indication of any life.

 

Before Lena was outside, she had a theory about what this massive structure was going to look like. She walked into the sunlight and while the others stood mesmerized by the barren vistas of this new world, Lena turned and craned her neck for a view of the structure she had just exited. It wasn’t what she expected. The door was only a small proportion of the exterior. On either side of the door were massive stone pylons, thick walls that towered above the entrance. Into the pylon walls were built narrow slits, windows that allowed air in, and, in case of attack could allow weapon fire to the outside. These pylons were very much in the style of those to be found at the ancient temples of Luxor and Karnak. Everything was starting to make sense.

 

Whilst the others were stupefied, Alex was on the move, “hold and secure positions around this entrance. I want a better look at where we are.”

 

“Hold on, I’ll go with you,” said Lena.

 

Alex didn’t respond. Lena trailed after the three soldiers as they jogged down the ramp. As the dunes grew higher around them, so did the temperature. Lena guessed it was ninety degrees in the air, one hundred and ten on the sand.

 

Lucy and Vasquez made it to the base of the ramp first and took up defensive positions at the base of the obelisks. When Lena approached, she saw that these marble pillars, forty feet tall and tapering to sharp pyramids at the top, were different from any she’d seen on Earth; they were not covered in hieroglyphs. Astonished, Lena couldn’t believe that her theories were being proven right before her very eyes.

 

After examining the twin spires, Lena ran past the soldiers and up the side of the first dune where Alex was already standing, looking back. When she reached the top and turned and looked back, hoping she would see the structure more clearly and, also, hoping that it would further support her hypothesis.

 

What she saw knocked the wind out of her. It was much more than she had hoped for in her wildest dreams. Not only was the enormous structure completely Egyptian in design but from this distance she could see the structure was merely an entrance to a larger structure. A structure more famous than any other in human history: a pyramid. But it was a pyramid so monstrously, phenomenally large that it seemed to be hovering above Lena, ready to come down and crush her. It had to be twice or three times as large as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Unlike the dilapidated pyramids in Giza, this one showed no signs of decay. Its smooth facing stones were all perfectly in place and seemed to shine under the hot suns. Speaking of suns. Hanging under the blue sky behind the pyramid were not one, not two but three suns.

 

Now Lena understood why the interior of the building seemed familiar. It was a far more advanced version of Khufu’s pyramid. Perhaps this was the very same structure the ancient Egyptians had once tried to reproduce. In a moment of triumph, she realized she’d been right all along.

 

“I knew it.”

 

Alex had no idea what Lena was talking about. She watched as Lena paced the sand, eyes never leaving the pyramid, repeating herself. Ignoring Lena, Alex went on with her calculations. She decided on a plan, stood and marched back up the ramp to deliver her orders.


	10. A Little White Lie

She sat in a slice of shadow between two dunes watching Science Officer Diggle hammer rod after rod deep into the ground, collecting soil and mineral samples. Diggle transferred the specimens into numbered glass beakers, murmuring an endless blur of facts and numbers into a tape recorder. Diggle and Lena were five hundred yards away from the obelisks, but even at this distance, the pyramid, the most primitive and mysterious of constructions, seemed to loom directly above them.

 

Lena had been back inside the pyramid to search for information, particularly the writing she had expected to find. The constellations engraved into the the inner wheel of the Stargate were the only glyphs of any kind. This absence of markings had scared and confused Lena. Whilst she stared at Diggle executing his procedures, she was thinking hard about what the team would have to do next.

 

Nearby, Alex had found a natural stone ledge and was using a pair of military issue binoculars to scrutinize the endless roll of pale brown dunes. Lucy and Valdes labored up the sandy hill to the top of bluff where Alex was standing. Both of the soldiers were drenched with sweat.

 

“Colonel, we’ve surveyed the quarter-mile perimeter. Nothing to report. It’s just a bunch of sand.” Lena could hear them clearly.

 

“All right, good job,” Alex said, “let’s wrap it up and move everyone back inside. I want you all back through within the hour. I’ll mark the equipment I want left behind.”

 

Alex looked over at Lena and started towards her.

 

Lucy wasn’t sure what she heard. She called after Alex, “what do you mean, ‘you all?’ Are you planning to stay for a while?” she was kidding, but suddenly realized it wasn’t a joke. Alex continued her march through the sand towards Lena. “Ma’am, you’re going back with us, aren’t you?” there was no reply.

 

When Alex reached Lena, she stopped and shouted to her men scattered in the sand, “let’s pack it up! It’s time to go.”

 

“Head back?” Lena knew that was impossible. She didn’t have enough information yet. She looked across the dunes, studying the pyramid. She knew Alex was about to give her the order she couldn’t execute.

 

“Get ready to move, we’ve got to get you back inside so you can get you work on the Stargate.”

 

Lucy, Roy and Susan came in earshot just in time to hear Lena telling Alex:

 

“I need more time. We’ve got to scout around. There’s bound to be other structures here, other signs of civilization. If I can find-”

 

“That would be nice, Luthor, but not on this trip,” Alex cut her off, “what we need from you is to get back inside and re-establish contact with the gate on Earth.”

 

The soldiers came to the top of the dune, surrounding Alex intent on understanding her plan. Lena was in the tricky position of announcing the bad news in front of them.

 

“You’re not getting it Alex, “she let it fly, “this structure is an almost exact replica of the Khufu pyramid.” There! Now they had the whole ugly truth.

 

“What are you talking about?” Roy asked with a pained expression, “I read a bit about ancient Egypt in high school and I think I know where this is going.”

 

Obviously, Lena had overestimated the group’s grasp of Egyptology, “what I’m talking about is that we’re not going to find any hieroglyphics or constellation displays inside this pyramid. No writing of any kind. I’ve checked everywhere!”

 

“Spit it out, Lena!” Lucy was suddenly very interested in what Lena had to say.

 

“Look, the coordinates were marked on tablets back on Earth, right?” she tried to sound encouraging, “so, there must be something like that here. All we have to do is expand our search and find it.”

 

Lucy’s face contorted into one of fury. She jumped into Lena’s face, “your only assignment was to spin the ring around and get us back home. Now, can you do it or not?”

 

Lena gulped, cowering under Lucy’s gaze, “no, I can’t.”

 

Alex put a restraining hand on Lucy’s shoulder whilst stepping between her and Lena, as calm as ever, “can’t or won’t?” she asked.

 

“You told us you could do it,” Lucy spat.

 

“I assumed I would have inform-”

 

“You assumed?” Alex’s disgust was plain.

 

Then Lucy lost it. She reached past the colonel and grabbed a fistful of Lena’s shirt, pulling her forward, “that wasn’t the deal, Luthor!!”

 

“Lieutenant,” Alex’s calm voice froze Lucy, but didn’t convince her to release her grip on the front of Lena’s uniform.

 

“Oh, this is beautiful, this is very pleasant,” Vasquez started yammering, “this means, correct me if I’m wrong, that we’re stuck here.”

 

Lucy was holding Lena close, her eyes beaming with pure hatred, “listen to me, you make this thing work, or I’ll shoot you myself.” Lucy felt herself on the verge of doing just that, so she pushed Lena away, knocking her backwards into the sand.

 

“That’s enough, lieutenant,” Alex announced very evenly, “we’ll establish our base camp right here. Lane, organize a detail to haul the supplies out here.”

 

“Establish a base camp?” Lucy was incredulous, “the mission objective is to recon the quarter-mile perimeter, then get back through the gate. What good is it gonna do us to-”

 

Alex was finished talking, “that’s enough, lieutenant! You are not in command of this mission.”

 

It seemed like the wrong way to say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. Lucy took a sudden, threatening step closer to Alex. For an instant, everyone was certain the two ladies would fight.

 

No one needed to remind Lucy of who was in charge. It had been an extremely sore spot for her ever since Alex had arrived and relieved her of her command. Until this moment, she had been able to suppress her anger, burying it deep within her professionalism. But it was clear to her that the whole project had started going to hell the minute Alex took over. And now here they were. They were marooned in this Saharan nightmare with, at best, three days worth of water. The success of the mission had never seemed important to Alex, and that led Lucy to suspect she might be hiding a secret agenda, something cooked up between her and General John Jones. She had every reason to detest Alex.

 

When Lucy stepped towards her, Alex made no move to defend herself, practically daring the other woman to attack. But the next second, Lucy did what Alex knew she would. She followed orders.

 

After a tense, threatening moment, Lucy chose the supply detail. “Vasquez! Hix! Harper! Valdes! Back inside,” she turned at once and began slogging down the side of the dune, the first steps of the long trip back to the pyramid.

 

Alex returned her attention to Lena, looking at her for a minute before saying, “now you’ve endangered everyone’s life except mine. Now follow the others and help them off-load the equipment and bring it back.”

 

Lena didn’t think following Lucy into the darkness of the pyramid was the safest course of action at the moment, but it didn’t seem as scary as staying outside with Alex, so she started down the dune after the soldiers.

* * *

An hour later, the soldiers were already well into the process of establishing the base camp, pounding long tent spikes into the ground, unpacking additional communications equipment, stacking the supply crates to erect a shade wall. None of the soldiers discussed the limited supply of rations and water, but everyone was thinking about it.

 

Lena was positive Lucy had assigned her the heaviest single item on the cart. It was slow, hot work tugging the crate across the rolling desert and then up the steep side of the last dune. About halfway up, she took a break and listened to the enlisted men argue.

 

“I don’t believe this! We’re stuck out here!” Vasquez was still having a fit.

 

“Knock it off, Miss Doomsayer. Quit being so negative,” Hix said.

 

“Hix is right,” agreed Roy, looking up from hammering the tent spike, “if we’re not back soon, they’ll just turn the Gate back on from Earth.”

 

“Look, Harper,” Vasquez started to lecture him, “ask yourself how we got here. Was it a two way street? No. We all got blasted through the Gate at about fifty billion miles per hour. Now, ask yourself this, how many directions were you going? One! Just one! Now, not only is the base emptier than a church on payday, but even if they turn it on from that side, what are you going to do? Swim against the current?”

 

Diggle was listening. He looked up from assembling the dish scanner and said, “Susan’s right. The beam moves one direction at a time, depending on what side it’s activated. If they turn it on from the other side and we go through, you’re dead the moment you touch the puddle.”

* * *

 

Inside the Stargate room, Alex lifted the last crate off the cart and walked towards the doorway. She turned down the long hallway, pitch-black except for a few series of flares. She didn’t see anyone coming. She immediately set the box down and returned to the equipment cart, kneeling over its floorboards. She reached into her pocked and pulled out an oddly shaped tool, then bent down to work. A moment later, Lucy’s voice was in the doorway.

 

“Ma’am! Base is operational.”

 

Coolly palming the tool, Alex eased around to face her, her expression as impassive as ever. She nodded in approval.

 

“I want to apologize for losing it out there,” Lucy began. Alex’s hand slide into her pocket then out again, unnoticed. “Part of it,” Lucy went on, “is that it seems like more is going on here than meets the eye.”

 

“So what?” Alex asked, implying that it wasn’t Lucy’s job to know everything.

 

“For instance,” the soldier persevered, “what was that you said about not coming back with us. What was that all about?”

 

“I accept your apology,” Alex replied flatly, “this crate goes to base camp.” Lucy stood her ground, waiting for a more human, more rational response. But Alex won’t budge: “you’re dismissed, Lane.”

 

Furious and disgusted but unwilling to show it, Lucy leaned over and picked up the last crate. She made sure Alex saw how easily she lifted it and walked out.

 

The moment she was gone, Alex went back to work on the equipment cart. Working the oddly shaped tool into a gap between the floorboards then giving it a strong twist, she revealed a hidden compartment. A hatch door popped open. Alex reached inside and brought out a pair of heavy steel cylinders. The gleaming canisters were obviously the two interlocking halves of a device. She lined up the guide marks on the thick tubes and pushed them together until they locked with a sharp click. As soon as the device was assembled, a small door, no more than two square inches, slid open at the end of the canister. It held a small square orange key. Alex took the key, then closed the panel. Very gingerly, she laid the log-sized device back into the hidden compartment and locked it.

 

She stood up and, when she was satisfied no one was watching, she forced the key into a slit cut into the waistband of her fatigues. Then she headed out to rejoin her team.

* * *

 

Lena pulled the trunk up the last sandhill and onto the rock shelf Alex had chosen as base. Exhausted and hurting, she collapsed chest first into the sand with a huge sigh of relief.

 

The soldiers showed how impressed they were by ignoring her completely and returning to their assigned tasks. When Lena pushed herself up, a layer of the sand came with her. She was dripping with perspiration, and the sand stuck to the moisture. Just what she needed: her uniform and face were both covered in sand. But that was the least of her problems. Her lower back felt like the bullseye at a hatchet tossing competition, and she could feel the first pain of sunburn rising on her neck and arms. She wondered what sunstroke felt like and whether she’d know when she had it.

 

She tipped the crate onto its tall side and sat in the sliver of shade it created. She started going through the supply kit she’d been issued. Toothpicks, water purification tablets, a two-ounce mylar blanket, a sewing kit, compass, processed fruit rolls, sunglasses, breath mints, two knives, signal flares, cyanide capsules, a hammock, string, tape, bandages, first-aid materials, but not the thing she was looking for. “I can’t believe you lot. There is everything inside here aside from sunblock.”

 

None of the soldiers so much as looked in her direction. Lena tried again. “Susan, Valdes, didn’t any of you bring sunblock?”

 

“Luthor, we need that crate over here,” Vasquez told him matter-of-factly. Lena wiped as much sand off her face as she could, then hunkered down into a box lifting stance. She decided to make two trips. She unlatched the lid and opened the box. When she saw what she’d been dragging across the desert, she jumped back with a shout.

 

“Are you planning to fight a war here?” Two dozen semi-automatic assault rifles were strapped into the crate.

 

“Thanks to you we’ve got time to fight one,” Vasquez hissed. She had just about reached the boiling point, and the sight of Lena staring at the rifles was making her hotter still, “why don’t you do something useful like reading!”

 

With one hand, she whipped Lena’s forty-pound backpack in a straight line through the air. It flew straight into Lena’s chest, sending her into an ungraceful back flip off the crest of the dune. She landed thirty feet down the hill in a spectacular shower of sand and books. By the time she’d sat up and spit a couple of times, her half empty bag was rolling to a stop at the base of the slope. Obviously, getting along with the soldiers was going to take a bit of work.

 

Vasquez walked to the edge of the dune and watched Lena stagger to her feet. She made sure she wasn’t hurt before going back to her work. By the time Lena looked up, the top of the cliff was empty. It was only her, her books and a lot of sand in between. Reluctantly and painfully, Lena started the long hot walk to the bottom of the steep hill.

 

She reached down stiffly for the last of the books, trying to grab it without bending her back. She got it, but as she was stuffing it into the sack, she suddenly let everything tumble to the ground.

 

Something had been there.

 

Pressed into the sand a few feet away were what appeared to be hoofprints. Lena edged closer. The prints were so deeply indented into the arid soil that only a very heavy animal could’ve left them. The tracks, obviously fresh, headed off around the next dune. Her first impulse was to call the others and show them what she’d found, but she was certain they’d only use the occasion to give her more grief. She looked up the slope, but the soldiers were out of sight. After a brief hesitation, she decided to see what was around the next dune. Lacing her fingers in front of her, trying to look absolutely harmless, Lena followed the trail around one dune and then another. The prints led her deeper and deeper into a maze of tall moguls, then to the base of a steep, twenty-foot wall of sand. It took Lena several tries before she was able to scramble to the top and take a look around.

 

That’s when she saw it. She froze, gripped by fear, and stared at the grotesque sight before her. Less than a stone’s throw away, a huge bizarre-looking animal raised its head and studied Lena through the blur of heat lifting off the sand. About the size of an elephant, it was a long-haired giant, a horrible hybrid of mastodon, camel and water buffalo. Extremely top heavy, the animal had absurdly thin legs to support its weight.

 

The two mammals stood in the hot sun staring at one blankly for a long time before the larger one turned away with a loud snort. It dropped its head back to the ground where it was rooting in the small strands of grass which was sticking out of the sand for food. Using its meager forelegs, it began to dig. Lena watched the powerful animal kick up big sprays of sand as it burrowed.

* * *

 

“Where’s Lena?” Lucy asked before she’d come to the top of the base camp hill. A few of the soldiers started snickering. All eyes went to Susan.

 

“She dropped her books over the side,” Vasquez explained, pointing to the edge of the stone outcropping. The way she said it brought a bigger laugh from a few of them, but Lucy wasn’t amused at all. She hurried to the edge of the bluff and looked over. Lena’s backpack lay at the bottom of the long incline, abandoned.

 

Grimly serious, Lucy turned back to Vasquez and got a straight answer out of her. The next moment, she was barking out a crisp series of commands. She put the base on alert and mustered a search party. She ordered Diggle and Valdes to grab rifles, canteens and field phones. The three of them were just about to leave when Alex arrived.

 

When the situation was explained to her, she repeated each of Lucy’s commands with one exception. She would join the search party instead of Valdes.

* * *

 

As Lena watched the beast dig, something in the animal’s fur glinted over and over again under the sun. The reflection was coming from the area around the animal’s jaw.

 

Lena didn’t notice it at first, because it seemed such a natural part of watching an animal graze, even an animal as weird looking as this one. But as soon as the sight registered with her, she immediately started marching in a straight line towards the creature, reaching into her pocket as she went. She brought out a granola bar and ripped the wrapper open, taking a quick bite. The animal quit digging when it sensed the human coming closer. It looked up, potentially menacing.

 

Lena hesitated long enough to question whether she was sunstroked or actually knew what she was doing. No, she was sure the metallic reflection could only mean one thing. She came close enough to see that the animal was fitted with a harness, stirrups and a set of reins that hung down to the sand.

 

The earthling took a deep breath. Here was an unmistakable sign that they were not alone. It meant there was intelligent life here, a species capable of making tools and domesticating other animals to help them do their work. Her heart rate surged, but she continued forward.

 

The closer she came, the slower Lena felt like walking. The animal seemed much bigger than it did a minute before, seven feet tall at the shoulder. And much uglier. At first glance, it had appeared to be a much larger cousin of Ovibos moschatus, the horned musk ox native to the North America tundra. Upon closer inspection, however, the beast looked like nothing so much as an early, not-completely-successful experiment in cross breeding. It could’ve been descended from the mammoths of the Pleistocene Epoch, or the horse like Hippotraginae antelope, or possibly from the extinct woolly rhinoceros. Or maybe all three. It had a high, humped back and long stringy hair that hung in dirty matted locks. The blistered, oily skin on its face held a pair of bulging, watery eyes set on either side of its stump-like head. Pointing straight ahead, the nostrils were glistening, moist and unusually large. It grunted toward the human, saliva dripping off its beard. It seemed to be friendly.

 

Simultaneously disgusted and fascinated, Lena crept forward. Even with her sore back, she didn’t feel like she was in any real danger. The harness, made from some type of leather and vines, told her the animal was probably tame. And besides, it looked much too slow and awkward to give her much of a race if it came to that. Lena had no idea how dangerous the situation was. She had had no experience handling livestock, and didn’t know that even a withered old milking cow can kick a full grown man to death. Like most people, Lena wanted to believe she shared shared a special sympathetic bond with all animals and babies.

 

Holding the granola bar at arm’s length, swallowing nervously, she crept closer. When she was within a few feet, she stopped short and her eyes widened dramatically. There was a red X moving across the side of the animal’s sweaty face. It took her a minute to realize that the X was a laser, a targeting device. She looked wildly around the desert and spotted Lucy aiming down at her from a far off dune. Alex and Diggle came to the top and stood on either side of her.

 

Lena puts her hands in the air, surrendering, “don’t shoot!” she yelled to the soldiers, “this is a tamed animal.”

 

The moment Lena’s arms shot into the sky, the beast began the ungraceful process of getting down on its knees. Obviously, both hands in the air was a command it had been taught by whatever masters it had. From the soldiers’ vantage point, it seemed that Lena knew what she was talking about. The animal looked about as threatening as a cow on roller skates as it folded its legs under and settled down into the dirt, the red X of the laser still trained on its brain pan.

 

“Don’t feed it! Alex ordered from the top of the mound, spotting the granola bar.

 

“It’s wearing a harness,” Lena yelled back, “just don’t shoot!” Although Lucy had no intention of firing until the animal attacked, Lena felt sure the shot would ring out any second. She had to prove the thing was tame before her companions butchered it. Smiling nervously, she called to them, “just watch. No reason to worry.”

 

Extremely worried, Lena came the last couple of steps towards the kneeling monster and held the granola bar at arms length. Slowly, she leaned forward until two thick slabs of lip flesh closed around her hand. Lena closed her eyes and held on. The animal’s breathe was foul. When the tongue, the size of a cave eel, slid across her hand, the sensation was too much. She yanked her hand free with a yelp, but immediately turned and faked another smile for the others. By that time, they were moving closer, only their helmets visible as they dipped between the first set of moguls. The creature grunted around in the sand, found the granola bar and chewed it up, wrapper and all.

 

Lena reached out and petted her furry new friend. Although it was emitting a sharp, punishing body odour, the animal seemed sweet enough in disposition.

 

“You’re a good boy, aren’t you?” Lena asked the animal in a high, singsong voice she used exclusively for friendly animals. Patting and scratching the brute’s filthy fur, Lena examined the reins and saddle that were made of animal skin and a poorly refined iron. Whoever made them had better skill than equipment.

 

“Who do you belong to?” Lena asked, reaching under the animal’s fleshy wet ear to scratch him.

 

It was the wrong place to touch. Faster than a scared rabbit, this tow-truck-on-legs stumbled up and broke into a sprint. Lena had just enough time to get out of the way, but unfortunately, she stepped directly into a loop in the reins. Half a second later, the slack in the reins disappeared, snagging Lena’s foot and yanking her violently into motion. The next thing she knew, she was sand surfing at breakneck speed across the uneven desert floor, being towed along by the yak from hell.

 

Lucy took aim, but it was too late. The beast was darting between four-foot dunes, bouncing Lena around like a tin can tied to the bumper of a car. The soldiers gave chase, but the beast’s incredible speed quickly increased the distance between them.

 

Lena was being pulled ankle first at forty-five m.p.h. across an endless skin-scratching washboard. Bumping and twisting, she glanced off the side of one dune only to crash with a spectacular spray of sand onto the face of the next.

 

When the terrain flattened out, and her trousers filled like a balloon full of heavy sand, she was able to control the ride somewhat by holding both hands out to the sides. She looked like a human catamaran. Despite the constant gale of sand kicked into her face by the pumping hooves, Lena sat up and tried to reach for her snagged boot. She almost had it when the medallion Cat had given her bounced up and out of her shirt. They were headed straight for a giant wall of sand. At the last second, the animal jagged away, but not soon enough for his passenger who rode to the top of the ramp, then went airborne just as the medallion bounced past her nose and over her head. She tried a desperate backward lunge just as the slack in the reins ran out, yanking her violently in a new direction. She scraped across the hot ground, face first, her nose scooping up sand.

 

Eventually the beast trotted to a stop. Lena, her sand filled uniform making her look like a circus fat man, was sneezing like a kitten who had just inhaled a pepper shaker. Like a miracle, nothing seemed to be broken. She looked at her hand and discovered she’d snagged the chain with one finger. Painfully, she rolled over, sat up, unstrapped her boot and started getting the sand out of her mouth, eyes, ears and nose.

 

Soon, she could see Alex, Diggle and Lucy coming past the last dune, jogging towards her with their rifles sighted on the animal. As the team came closer, the beast turned around and started licking Lena’s face.

 

“Get away,” she complained, trying to slap the face away. The beast ignored her, continuing to nuzzle and lick. Alex got there first.

 

“Alex, get this thing off me.”

 

Strangely, Alex lowered her gun and walked right past Lena to the lip of the nearby ledge. Diggle and Lucy did the same. Seeing that she would get no help from her supposed team mates, Lena pushed the animal away and came to see what the others were gawking at..

 

“What is it?” she asked, coming up the slope.

 

They were looking down into a deep ravine that ended in a spectacular set of white cliffs. Crawling by the thousands across the faces of the cliffs, marching in lines across the valley’s flat bottom, and climbing up a series of gigantic ladders were thousands upon thousands of human beings.


	11. So Much For Communication

Thousands upon thousands of ragged, dirty men were laboring in organized large groups, into battalions of two hundred or more, some of them working on the narrow shelves cut into the bright white cliffs, others out on the muddy floor of this colossal mining pit. It was a scene of horrible human misery. In the stifling afternoon heat, the miners were scrambling everywhere, edging out on thin ledges cut into the cliffs. At the bottom of the valley, where the groundwater prevented them from going deeper, they worked in milk coloured mud. At several points around the perimeter of the stadium-shaped bowl, there had been major cave-ins, places where the soft walls had given way and crashed towards the muddy bottom, burying everything in their way.

 

Alex surveyed the scene through her binoculars. Young children, no older than seven or eight worked alongside the men. Their main task appeared to be carrying satchels of ore or coal-like substance up the network of thin trails that snaked like veins to the top of the ravine. But the most dramatic way in or out of this man-made canyon were the rope ladders. There were hundreds of these handwoven ladders hanging everywhere between levels, but half a mile from the team, two dozen of them reached spectacular lengths, connecting the very bottom of the pit with a rock outcropping three hundred feet above. Uneven in thickness and stitched with broken rungs, they looked perilously slipshod. Nonetheless, each of them wagged back and forth with the weight and motion of between forty and fifty boys at once, some climbing with their loads, others passing them on the way down.

 

Some were working shirtless, but most of them were wearing thick robes that covered them shoulders to ankles. It seemed like bizarre wardrobe given the heat. Worse, their heads were covered by hoods or scarves, wrapped in a fashion similar to the bedouins of the Syria and Jordan.

 

The mining enterprise extended into the valley for two and a half miles. From the team’s angle, the workers looked like ants moving everywhere across the surface of the valley. One work group, at least a hundred men strong, was working a long stone’s throw beneath the soldiers. Their work was kicking up clouds of white dust so thick it looked impossible to breathe. They were covered with the powdery soot, giving them the eerie appearance of dusty ghosts.

 

The away-team was astonished, blown away. They thought they were prepared for anything. Ten-foot-tall aliens with swollen pink heads wouldn’t have surprised them half as much as what they had found: humans. It sent a shockwave of recognition through the team, a sudden awareness of being related to these people. Even Alex did something completely out of character. Once she’d established they weren’t armed, she handed the binoculars to Diggle, who was clearly eager for a look.

 

Lena’s mind raced. Human beings, here, on the other side of the known universe? What was the connection? Could these people be descendants of people from Earth? Or, more disturbingly, could we be descended from them? For every answer Lena could find, a thousand questions would arise.

 

Everything changed the moment the first worker looked up and made eye contact with Lena. His shout caused a hundred heads to turn towards the top of the dune. Then, in a long chain reaction back across the valley, work stopped and all the thousands looked to see what was happening. Those who were close enough saw the four men in military clothing isolated against the giant wall of white sand.

 

Lucy and Vasquez instinctively readied their guns and wanted to retreat up the hill to better positions. Alex signalled them to put their guns down and watched the curious miners watch her. There was no malice in the growing crowd, but neither was there any sign of welcome. Neither side knew how to move.

 

“Fall back,” Lucy decided. Then she corrected herself, “should we fall back, ma’am?”

 

“What would that accomplish?” Alex asked after thinking about it, “we might as well meet the neighbours.” She started off down the slope.

 

“What the hell is she doing now?” Diggle knew exactly what she was doing.

 

“Let’s trail her,” Lucy said, getting up to follow. Now twenty thousand eyes were fixed on the strange visitors as they piled their way down one of the spillways into the ravine. Some watched frozen from the cliffs, laying their tools on the ground. Across the uneven valley floor, they continued to come, crowding around to gawk up at the first unknown travellers in their history. As Lena walked down into the gorge, she felt like something was swallowing her.

 

Alex lead the way, watching the crowd gather mass. Fortunately, she saw no sign of hostility. The people seemed peaceful and curious. But there was something strange in the way they were milling about. Alex couldn’t quite put her finger on what was odd in their behaviour. She gave the crowd her iciest stare, intentionally intimidating them. But when she saw that wasn’t necessary, the next step was to talk.

 

“Luthor, come down here,” she motioned her Egyptologist forward, “talk to them.”

 

Lena froze, “what? How?”

 

“You’re the language expert. Try and communicate,” Alex ordered.

 

Lena hesitated, but then plunged in. With the entire population of the mining colony scrutinizing her, she slowly walked past Alex to the base of the cliff. She approached one of the miners, a skinny buck toothed man, and spoke the historic first words between the two disparate cultures:

 

“Um… hello?”

 

The man turned and laughed nervously to no one in particular. He was more than a little tense about being singled out like this.

 

“I am Lena. Lena,” she said again, gesturing to herself, “and you?”

 

Blank stares.

 

Lena tried a formal Japanese-style bow. This time she met with more success. Several of the men in front awkwardly returned the gesture. It was a beginning.

 

“ _ _Essalai imana__ ,” Lena said very formally, bowing once again. The miners raised their eyebrows and looked at one another. Obviously, they didn’t speak Aramaic. Switching gears, Lena tried speaking ancient Egyptian, a language that hadn’t been heard on Earth for the past seventeen hundred years. Since no one knew exactly how to pronounce the verbal equivalents of the hieroglyphs, all Lena could do was take a stab at it.

 

“ _Neket sennefer ado ni_ ,” she announced. _We come in peace_. The miners stared back at her, politely curious but obviously not understanding. She tried several slight variations of the sentence’s vowel structure, but nothing seemed to work. Either they didn’t understand ancient Egyptian, or she couldn’t speak it.

 

She went through several less likely possibilities. She greeted the crowd in Berber, Omotic, ancient Hebrew and Chadic. But nothing worked. It was an intensely frustrating moment for Lena. She had spent her life studying these languages, achieving levels of fluency that were far beyond the merely useful. Now, she was given the opportunity to actually use them, and found that they were good for nothing.

 

Lena looked up at the hot suns contemplating her next move and began absent-mindedly fiddling with the medallion around her neck when a man standing nearby came absolutely unglued and started screaming wildly. He was screaming something to the rest of the miners, a look of sheer brick-shitting terror on his face.

* * *

“ _Naturru ya ya!! Naturru ya ya!!_ ” he cried over and over whilst he backed away, cringing in fear as if Lena were going to start whipping him at any second. Everyone started dropping to their knees as quickly as the could and ‘assumed the position,’ putting their faces to the sand in a posture of abject servitude and submission. In a few seconds, the words “ _naturru ya ya_ ” had been repeated in every corner of the mining pit, causing the many thousands of miners to prostrate themselves face down in the white sand. Lena stumbled backwards.

 

“What the hell did you say to them?” Alex demanded.

 

“Nothing. All I said was hello.”

 

“Dammit, Luthor, I told you to communicate with them!”

 

“How?” Lena pointed at the grovelling masses.

 

“Oh for gods sake, Luthor, just communicate!” Exasperated, Alex studied the crowd for a moment, then approached one, a teenage boy, at random. She tugged the kid to his feet with one hand and offered a handshake with the other. When the boy didn’t understand, Alex seized his hand and shook it, saying “hello, United States of America. Colonel Alex Danvers-Sawyer.”

 

The boy looked like he had developed rigor mortis. He was so alarmed and confused, he was about to cry. When Alex saw this, she relaxed her grip and let the terrified youngster run off, scared out of his wits.

 

“So much for communication,” Lena commented.

 

“Colonel, eleven o’clock,” Lucy drew attention to something moving towards them across the floor of the valley. It was another one of the mammoth-like animals, but this one was finely groomed, with silver ornaments and carefully braided hair. On its humped back carried a decorated howdah whose passenger was hidden behind veils draped over the windows. As the animal ambled forward, it parted the silent crowd like a royal rowboat bobbling through water lilies.

 

Walking beside the animal, speaking excitedly up to the closed litter, was the same boy who shook Alex’s hand. The window cover was pulled back, and the rider shouted angrily at the boy who immediately backed away.

 

The animal arrived, escorted by a small entourage that included some females. The soldiers assumed they were about to meet one of the overseers of this miserable operation and poised themselves for a showdown. But when the small door swung open, it was a moderately built man with combed black hair who climbed down the side of the animal with quick agility. He wore a deep blue robe that was unlike those worn by the others. He had on a red headdress similar to the ones worn by the bedouins of the middle east.

 

His mood was very serious, concentrated as he walked over to the group. He walked right up to Lena. Without warning, he fell to his knees and started racing through some sort of catechism or prayer. He was talking fast, inches from Lena’s feet. Lena looked back at her companions and asked, “what’s he doing?”

 

“We don’t know, O Holy Mistress,” Lucy said with a smirk and a mock bow. It was obvious these people thought Lena was something she wasn’t.

 

Lena bent and listened to the man as he recited the long invocation. The words sounded like they could be Omotic or Berber. Possibly even Chadic.

 

Whatever it was, Lena didn’t recognise it. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the prayer was over. The man pushed himself back onto his feet and was imitated by everyone on the valley. He signalled for the women to come forward. Two of them did, bringing water in big earthen cups.

 

They younger woman came to Lena handing her a piece of very soft cloth. Then she raised her pitcher to pour the water. Did she want to wet the towel? She held it out to her cupped in her hand. The woman held out her finger and shook it “no, take that away.” By the time Lena understood what she was expected to do, it was too late. She’d looked into the girl’s eyes and had been electrocuted by her beauty, her impossibly magnetic eyes. Her mind went into a tailspin, and she started experiencing deja vu. But how can you have deja vu about someone you’ve never seen before? Maybe it was the first sign of sunstroke. She must have looked strange because the girl reached up with the cloth and wiped her across the brow. Lena was surprised by the open tenderness of her gesture, the caring way she wiped the cool towel across her forehead.

 

She held out the pitcher again, and this time Lena, looking into her eyes, knew what to do. She cupped her hands and caught the drink she poured her, then swallowed it while giving her a meaningful look.

 

The girl, clearly somewhere in her twenties, painfully shy, then moved on to Lucy. Lena noted with disappointment that she wiped Lucy’s forehead the same way. It was just part of the ceremony. The man was speaking to her again. Lena tried to concentrate. Then an idea hit her.

 

Lena unwrapped a granola bar and held it out, offering the man a taste. The man understood what Lena was doing, but was clearly apprehensive about eating the exotic substance. To him, as for humans everywhere, the sight of unfamiliar food looked ugly and potentially poisonous. After some hesitation, he reached out, accepted the bar and took a small bite. His worried eyes grew wide with concentration as he chewed. Then suddenly, his whole face lit up in a smile.

 

“ _Bonniwae_ ,” he said.

 

“ _Bonniwae_ ,” Lena repeated the word, thrilled to be communicating with him.

 

“ _Bonniwae_ ,” he said again, giving the new taste an enthusiastic endorsement.

 

“What does that mean?” interrupted Lucy.

 

“I have no idea,” replied a thrilled Lena.

 

Pointing and beckoning, the man in the blue robe used sign language to invite his visitors to go somewhere beyond the high walls of the pit.

 

“They’re inviting us to go somewhere,” Lena stated.

 

“Where?”

 

“How should I know? Somewhere in that direction,” Lena shrugged.

 

The squad turned to Alex for a decision. But she hadn’t made one yet. She was watching the man like a hawk, scanning him for any clue of deception. She didn’t want to walk into a trap. The man seemed puzzled by the silence. He repeated the invitation with clearer, broader gestures.

 

Lena tried to persuade Alex, “aren’t we looking for signs of civilization? We’ve obviously found it. If we want to find the Stargate’s symbols and get home, we’ve got to go with them. This is my best chance.”

 

Alex just stood there, as expressive as a brick wall. Although it was a pretty convincing argument, she knew Lena was more excited about playing the role of amateur archaeologist than anything else. She wasn’t convinced until Diggle offered new information.

 

“She’s probably right, ma’am. I’ve been taking readings on this stuff they’re mining. It’s the same quartz-like material that the gate is made of.”

 

“Alright. There’s no alternative,” Alex concluded, “radio back to base camp. Tell them to keep the area secure until our return.”

* * *

 

They came out of the pit along a wide switchback trail, the man leading a caravan ten thousand strong. At the top of the road, there were two more tall obelisks marking the entrance. Lena broke out of line and jogged up to walk beside the man to study his manner and dress.

 

His name was Zor-El, and although ceremony called for him to walk alone, he wanted to know more about these visitors so he allowed Lena to walk alongside him. He wasn’t sure whether they were gods, but with production slowing in the mines lately, he didn’t want to take any risks. He could see that their weapons were very advanced and their manner was not entirely friendly. They were dangerous in more than one way. Whether they were gods or not, Zor-El didn’t want to take any chances, so he decided it best to treat them as though they were.

 

The one walking next to him, the woman with tied back hair, seemed friendly and peace loving enough. And very talkative. Zor-El listened patiently to the woman’s gibberish but could make no sense of it.

 

Lena had never had so much trouble communicating in all her life. She felt herself on the verge of losing her temper, so she took a deep breath and marched along with the man for several minutes in silence. About the only thing she learned before rejoining the soldiers was that these giant pack animals were called _mastadges_.

 

Each of the stump-headed animals was tended to by a distinctive-looking teenager. Cleaner and younger than the miners, the shepherd boys wore striking haircuts, long dreadlocks hanging from mostly clean-shaven scalps. Marching next to Zor-El was the boy who seemed to be the de facto leader of the shepherds, the same boy who had unwillingly shaken hands with Alex a few minutes before.

 

His name was Kal-El, nephew of Zor-El. He was a handsome skinny kid who walked with his chest slightly puffed out and his head held high. Unlike the other shepherds, his hair was similar to his uncle’s, neatly combed but with a slight curl on his fringe. He was angry at himself for having run away from Alex before, and was determined to be fearless and strong from now on.

 

The caravan turned and headed down a long valley with a steep Une of rocky cliffs on the right. Twenty minutes later, they’d come to a break in the cliffs. Lena looked behind her and saw the thousands of people marching in line, still coming over the last crest and down into this valley. Zor-El turned them up the slope towards the gap in the hills. When he came to the top, he stopped and called Lena to the front, pointing across the long plain.

 

In the distance, Lena saw the high walls of a huge fortress, a city. It was the ancient settlement of these people rising like an island from the endless ocean of sand. Awed, Lena turned and shouted to the soldiers.

 

“It’s a city!”

 

While Alex trotted forward to recon the scene, Lena had time to pick the maiden out of the crowd again. They looked directly at one another for a heartbeat until both pretended to notice something else. This exchange did not go unnoticed by Zor-El.

 

“Put your tongue back in your mouth,” Alex snapped, arriving at the top of the hill. She surveyed the scene, then came down the slope to find her squad. She explained that they would enter the city one at a time, at intervals of ten paces: Diggle, then Lucy, then Lena and then herself.

 

When Alex left to explain the sequence to Lena, Lucy turned to Diggle.

 

“As soon as you’re inside, check above and behind, I’ll be two paces behind you.”

* * *

 

When they came within two hundred yards of the city, Zor-El signalled for something. One of the women brought forward a long animal horn. Zor-El put it to his lips and trumpeted a message to the city. A set of tall doors swung open between the two main towers. These towers, eighty feet tall, were made of the same material as the rest of the city - solid stone the colour of straw. The perimeter wall, which ran off unevenly in both directions for several hundred yards was only slightly lower than the towers, about the height of a six-story building. Zor-El had sent a few of the boys running ahead before Alex could stop them, so by the time Diggle was at the gate, a throng of curious onlookers were swarming the entrance.

 

Before he was through the doors, Diggle knew there was no possibility of avoiding an ambush if that is what these people had planned. Inside the city, there were more tall buildings crowding around narrow streets. The air itself was thick with people. A matrix of footbridges connected the upper floors of the buildings, all of them were jammed with spectators who could be concealing weapons beneath their robes.

 

For the last few minutes, Lena had been drawing strange looks from the people observing from the slate grey rooftops. Adding to her discomfort, her filthy friend, the _mastadge_ , had been bumping her with its oily nose looking for more food. As she came to the doors, wide enough for ten people to walk abreast, the distance between Lena and the girl closed. Now they were walking practically side by side, and Lena felt a rush of heat come to her face. She ransacked her mind for something suitable to say to her, and was about to speak when the _mastadge_ nuzzled her again in a sensitive area. Lena quickly pulled the last granola bar out of her pocket. Before she unwrapped it, she shook it in the animal’s face.

 

“A little bit,” she explained to the animal before she unwrapped the treat. But the big fleshy lips reached out and snatched the bar away.

 

“A little bit!” but the animal was already chewing happily, “now stop bugging me!”

 

Behind her, Lena heard Alex’s voice saying, “I told you not to feed it.”

 

The miners walking nearby picked up on the words, “little bit,” repeating them over and over. The foul-smelling _mastadge_ had a new name.

 

Lena’s torment ended when one of the boys pulled the animal away by the reins toward a holding area just inside the gate. The animal moaned in protest about being separated by its new provider.

 

When Lena looked up, she was both amazed and very uneasy. This was not a city for the claustrophobic. The rough walls towered above them as they walked along this central street. On both sides, narrow twisting alleyways cut between the buildings. At every angle, from windows and bridges, pressed into doorways and leaning over ledges, the population of this city surged forward to stare at her with intense curiosity. The team was now completely at the mercy of this people, about whom they knew almost nothing about.

 

When they were a hundred yards deep into the city, they came into a large open square, where Zor-El had turned to wait for them. While people filled the square, Lena studied the buildings around her. The primary building material was stone, large slabs skilfully quarried. But the most surprising element was wood. The rickety staircases that staggered up the sides of buildings, the gangplanks bridging the upper floors and the doors to the many apartments were all made of a gnarled rose-coloured wood. Around the windows and across the cornices of the buildings, elaborate geometrical designs had been chiselled into the stone. But nowhere could Lena spot anything that looked like a written inscription.

 

Zor-El stepped onto a small platform and raised his staff into the air signalling for silence. When they were, he turned to the visitors and started rambling through what sounded like another prayer. When he was finished, he used his staff to point to a covered object hanging high between two buildings. As he did so, a man on a scaffolding pulled away a large piece of cloth. As the curtain fluttered to the ground, Lena looked up in total astonishment.

 

Suspended under the archway by a tangle of bulky ropes, she saw an enormous gold disk, easily ten feet across. Emblazoned across its surface was an exact replica of the design on Lena’s medallion, the one Cat Grant found in Egypt. As soon as the giant disk was revealed, the entire city fell, its knees in one massive human wave, bowing towards the visitors. It was an awesome sight.

 

“I think they think we’re gods,” Lena said.

 

“What do you think could have given them that idea?” Alex asked. She looked up at the giant disk, then down at the smaller version hanging on Lena’s chest. She reached out and took a hold of the treasure, pulling Lena half a step closer. The colonel looked at her, suspicious, menacing.

 

“Exactly what does this symbol mean?” Alex asked, threateningly. She was sure Lena knew more than she was letting on.

 

“It’s the sign of Ra, the Egyptian sun god,” as Lena explained this, she felt a sour sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, “it looks like they worship him. They must think he sent us here.”

 

Satisfied Lena being truthful, Alex released her grip on the medallion.

 

From his platform, Zor-El was making some sort of speech, gesturing frequently towards the team. Somewhere in the middle of it, Diggle’s radio came to life. The signal was so dim, Diggle plugged in an earphone and cranked the volume up. Through the crackling of electrostatic interference, he heard what sounded like Vasquez’s voice.

* * *

 

It had come on so quickly, there was almost no warning. At first, Vasquez had ordered the team off the crest of the bluff towards shelter. She quickly realized her mistake, struggled up the hill, and got on the short wave radio. Down on her knees with her jacket pulled over her head, she was screaming as loud as possible into the handset. She was trying to warn the away-team. The roaring noise around her, a high-pitched shrieking howl, made it difficult for her to hear her own voice.

 

“Must abandon base camp! Repeat: must abandon base camp!” she yelled.

 

As she knelt, she felt something crash down on top of her. It was Valdes, staggering blindly across the top of the bluff.

 

“Let’s go!” he yelled to Vasquez, “let’s get out of here.”

 

Vasquez nodded. They had to get back to the pyramid or they were dead.

* * *

 

“Come again, base camp. No copy,” Diggle said urgently into the radio, “say again, base camp!” By that point, everyone’s attention was riveted to the drama of Diggle shouting into his radio. Whatever ceremony Zor-El was trying to observe had been completely interrupted.

 

Frustrated, Diggle gave up on trying. He looked to Alex and said, “it’s no use. Something’s interfering with the signal.”

 

A deep horn blast sounded from the top of the perimeter wall near the main gate. A moment later, a second horn moaned to life, and the pair of them sent a low rumbling blast through the city. Every head in the square turned and looked as one. Something was wrong.

 

Alex made a snap decision, “we’re heading back right now. Let’s move.”

 

Lucy and Diggle were on their feet and moving before Lena could say, “why?”

 

Alex’s first impulse was to leave Lena behind, maroon her, pay her back in kind. But at the last minute, she came back and grabbed Lena by the sleeve of her uniform and started pulling her down the narrow street. The path back to the gate was choked with at least a thousand people. As the soldiers pushed forward, hands reached out to stop them, and mouths, frantically speaking, tried to explain something urgent. They were telling them not to go.

 

At first, Alex pushed them aside politely but firmly. But when she saw a handful of men pushing the main gates closed, she broke into a sprint, clearing the way with a series of brutal forearm shivers to the head or throat of anyone who stood in her way.

 

The men closing the gate ignored Alex’s shouts. They had just finished reinforcing the door with the first of three heavy cross beams when Alex arrived at the entrance flanked by her two soldiers.

 

“Open this door!” she thundered at them, showing them what she wanted with a gesture.

 

All of them started talking at once, waving their hands and pointing over the wall, out into the desert. It was clear they weren’t going to cooperate, so Alex called Lucy over.

 

“You think we can lift this by ourselves?”

 

Lucy shot her a look that said, ‘easily’. standing shoulder to shoulder, they were a formidable sight, both of them taller and more muscular than these mostly thin, mostly haggard people. No one in their right minds would tangle with these two. Nevertheless, as they moved towards the gate, one of the gatekeepers reached out and grabbed Alex’s wrist.

 

With a speed that surprised even her group, Alex corkscrewed the man’s arm behind his back and slammed him face first against the door. As the man slid half-conscious and whimpering to the ground, Alex took her pistol from her holster and pointed it into the crowd.

 

“Don’t do it!” Lena screamed.

 

Alex raised her gun above her head and fired three times into the air.

 

Each explosion jolted the crowd. They had never heard gunfire before, and they were instinctively terrified. Everyone froze in their tracks, stunned and afraid. Zor-El, trailed by two of the city’s Elders, caught up to the team and nervously came forward out of the crowd to see what was happening. “ _ _Sha shay tiyu__ ,” Zor-El yelled.

 

“Diggle, help Lucy with this door,” Alex ordered, going eye to eye with the crowd, daring someone to make a move.

 

Lena was sure Alex would start gunning people down any second. She had no idea why the woman had gone berserk, ruining all the goodwill they had established with these strange desert people. Leaving before they had explored the city, she thought, would be a suicidal mistake. They still needed the signs for the Stargate.

 

“ _Sha shay ti yu_. _Sha shay ti yu_ ,” Kal-El, the shepherd boy who had unwillingly shaken Alex’s hand came out of the crowd moving very slowly. Alex lifted her pistol, aiming between the boy’s eyes.

 

“ _Sha shay ti yu_ ,” he kept saying softly. He held his hands open and in front of him as he approached the woman, careful neither to threaten nor show fear. Accustomed to handling the powerful _mastadges_ , Kal-El knew how to approach a frightened animal. Alex cocked the firing pin, but the boy kept coming closer, repeating the words and pointing to the ramparts at the top of the wall.

 

Alex glanced up to the walkway at the top of the thick walls. A dozen or so people were spectating from up there, and some of them waved for her to come up. The boy pointed to Alex, then up at the wall and used his fingers like eyes looking around.

 

“He wants you to look over the wall,” Lena interpreted for Alex.

 

“I know what he wants,” Alex snapped.

 

Alex turned to Lucy before following the boy up the ladder.

 

“If they try anything, kill them.”

 

With one last check around, Alex followed Kal-El into one of the towers that stood at either side of the gate. Inside, they found their way up a circular staircase built for people shorter than Alex. They came out onto the stone walkway between the city’s double wall. Standing where her team could see her, Alex looked out over the wall for what seemed like a long time.

 

“What is it?” Lucy didn’t appreciate being left hanging when she was holding a thousand people at gunpoint.

 

A giant low-flying brown cloud, as wide as the horizon, was rolling across the desert floor towards the city like a flash flood. Alex could feel the breeze turning to wind.

 

“A sandstorm. Coming this way,” she yelled back.

 

Kal-El pointed beyond the wall and taught Alex the word for sandstorm, “ _sha shay tiyu_ ”

 

“Excellent,” Lena said sarcastically, “that would’ve been an excellent reason to shoot everyone!” not content to let tempers cool by themselves, and suddenly she had the moral high ground, Lena marched over to the soldiers and forced the nose of Lucy’s rifle towards the ground.

 

“Don’t push me, Luthor!” the lieutenant warned her.

 

Alex leaned over the parapet and called down, “we’ll have to stay here until the storm’s over.”

* * *

 

Vasquez realized it was probably too late, but she had to try. Lugging the thirty-pound stationary radio unit, she fought her way through the storm, staggering up the long ramp towards the shelter of the pyramid. The gusts, sweeping up ton after ton of sand, were strong enough to knock her off the ramp and out into the dunes if she lost her balance. As the dust thickened, she pulled her t-shirt up over her nose to filter the air. Squinting hard to protect her eyes, she moved more and more slowly, afraid of stepping off the side of the ramp.

 

She came through the tall open entrance and turned the corner, wiping the fine sand away from her face. As soon as her scratched and watery eyes were clear enough to see, she switched the radio on.

 

“Mayday. Mayday. Diggle, do you read me?”

 

As the last members of Vasquez’s base squad came stumbling in out of the storm, she was already edging her way back towards the storm, trying to get her radio signal around the stone walls.

 

After a minute of trying, she thought she heard Diggle’s voice responding through the interference, but she couldn’t be sure. The storm was too loud. Just in case Diggle could hear her, Vasquez screamed into the transmitter, trying to alert them to the disaster headed their way. After several minutes, she retreated deeper into the shelter. Positioning the radio set as close to the door as possible, she turned the volume up full blast and set her helmet over the top of it to help protect it against the dust. With sand crunching between her teeth, Vasquez moved back inside to join the rest of the team.

 

They had no idea whether the away squad was safely under the protection of the ‘thousands of people’ Diggle had told them about over the radio, or whether they were choking to death in the desert. But all of them could sense their chances of surviving this mission quickly slipping away. Without anyone saying a word, they sat down in a semicircle facing the entrance and watched the dark wind whip sand past the doorway.

 

After a minute, Hix got up and went to the radio, switching it off and pulling it several feet further from the dust.

 

“You’re wasting the batteries,” he told Vasquez, “we’re not gonna get any kind of signal during this storm. We should try again when it passes.”

 

“This is bad. It’s very bad,” Vasquez shook her head, “I was in Saudi Arabia for two years and I never saw anything like this.”

 

She wanted to kick herself. If she hadn’t thrown that bag of books at Lena, if she’d exercised a little more self control, she wouldn’t have to sit there helplessly imagining Alex’s search party being suffocated. She also knew that without Lena, the probability of them getting home was a big fat zero. They were trapped in a nightmare, and she had nailed the coffin shut.

 

“I don’t get it. Why don’t we just try and turn the Gate on ourselves. I mean, how hard could that be?” Roy suggested.

 

“And what happens if you spin that thing in the wrong order and we appear somewhere out in the middle of space?” Vasquez asked, “have you any idea how many combinations are on that Gate?”

 

“No. How many?” Hix asked wryly.

 

Vasquez started chalking the problem up on her mental blackboard, but then caught Hix grinning at her, “fuck off, Hix.”

 

The soldiers fell silent again, staring at the grand rectangle of an entrance. They could’ve been part of an ancient, surrealist drama: an audience waiting in a giant stone chamber for the actors to make their entrances.

* * *

 

Several miles from this peculiar stage, beyond the hiss of the wind, an oblong asteroid tumbled upward over the horizon growing in brilliance as the sky darkened to evening around it. It was the misshapen pearl that was this planet’s moon, and it was suddenly blotted out by a triangular shadow moving across the sky. A few seconds later, the shadow slid away and was gone.

* * *

The last light of the last sun was quickly faltering behind the impenetrable curtain of airborne sand. As it did, the light on the scene in the entrance hall dimmed until the clean edges of the radio began to decompose, dwindling into the approaching night.

 

The soldiers heard something coming from the direction of the entrance. Rifles snapped to the ready. It was the unmistakable sound of metal clattering on metal. It was Vasquez’s helmet vibrating atop the radio. The next moment, all the equipment and then the entire floor began to tremble.

 

“Earthquake! Just what we need, a fucking earthquake!”

 

“It’s not,” Hix shouted over the rumbling, moving to a sheltered position between the pillars. The shaking and the noise got more and more intense.

 

Hovering above the storm, slowly lowering itself through the storm was pyramid shaped aircraft. Bright beams of light knifed from its sides into the night sky. This floating pyramid was descending to a landing atop the larger pyramid on the ground.

 

Long mechanical arms unfolded themselves, dropping into the sky like an eagle’s talons as the ship lowered itself directly onto the tip of the great stone structure below it. The landing arms found their targets and locked down tight. This was the explanation that had eluded generations of researchers, the answer to the riddle of the great pyramid called Khufu. It had been built as a landing station for this type of craft.

 

Once the landing was successful, parts of the giant spaceship’s armoured exterior began to move. Huge sections of the outer walls started to open and unfold. Like a high-tech origami construction, it began converting itself from a ship to a pyramid palace penthouse.

 

Before the long and complicated transformation was complete, a new presence was entering the pyramid. Deep inside the edifice, where the matching medallions had been set into both floor and ceiling, a rod of blue light shot between the two disks, connecting them. The beam spread sideways along both medallions, slowly shaping itself into a closed tube on light.

 

The soldiers, jittery, guns trained in every direction, were whispering among themselves about what to do. At the same time, a presence was moving swiftly down the dark corridors, coming closer. Vasquez lit a flare and was about to toss it towards the entrance when she heard something behind her.

 

She turned just in time to see a jackal-headed creature towering above her. It was too late to do anything but gasp.


	12. The Ceremony

“I don’t think we should be eating anything, Luthor,” Lucy whispered over the music. The truth was, she was starving and wanted to know if the others were planning to risk the food.

 

Lena, playing with a piece of the rubbery, too-spicy ‘bread’ leaned down the table and said, “they might take that as an insult.”

 

The feast was an hour old, and still no food had been delivered. Whilst torchlight played on the ominous disk that seemed to watch them from above, the visitors sat cross-legged behind the long low tables that had been carried into the courtyard and placed on colourful woven carpets.

 

In the open space between the tables, a group of musicians had been sawing and plucking at their stringed instruments, playing what sounded like the same song over and over again. Earlier, Diggle, a decent guitarist, had delighted the crowd by improvising on one of their instruments. The hundreds of people crammed into the courtyard had cheered when he picked up the three-stringed instrument and plucked out a few simple blues riffs. Taking their clues from Lena and Lucy, the onlookers had snapped their fingers and tapped their toes, even though Diggle’s song was as foreign to them as the present melody was to the newcomers. Only Lena seemed to enjoy the group’s minimalist, whining music, which reminded her of the hand-clapping ‘Balee’ chants she’d heard performed at Nubian weddings during her visits to Upper Egypt.

 

The table was set for twenty-two, all of them men, aside from the visitors. As far as Lena could tell, the women of this society were expected to serve quietly, then make themselves scarce. Zor-El was among the eighteen locals, all who were older than Zor-El himself, with thick beards and despite the evening heat, were attired in itchy-looking grey robes with hoods. They were obviously the city’s ruling Elders, its political leaders. They seemed to be having a good time.

 

Into the circle of torchlight came a procession of serving women dressed in dazzling silken costumes carrying all manner of tableware: Terra-cotta dishes and platters piled high with vegetables, iron goblets, appetizers, spatulas, napkins and knives, soup spoons and saucepans, punch bowls of wine with thistles floating on the surface, and, finally, a pair of four-foot-long tureens that had to be carried on poles. Everything was set down on the ill-constructed tables that sagged in their middles, threatening to collapse. Lucy lifted the cloth draped over the top of the heavy tureen in front of her. When she saw what was inside, she jumped back in horror.

 

Laying on its back in a shallow pool of broth was a giant lizard that had been cooked whole - skin, eyes, tail and all. It had the same ash grey scaly skin as a desert snake. The animal’s lips had pulled tight during the cooking process to expose its bright yellow gums. Its feet and head poked out of the steaming soup as if it had died peacefully while taking a bath.

 

“Well, Luthor, you don’t want to offend them now, do you?” Lucy offered sarcastically.

 

“Permission to vomit?” Diggle asked, only half joking.

 

“They can’t seriously expect us to eat this, can they?”

 

In one movement, the team turned to look down the table. The Elders were enthusiastically motioning for them to dig in. The four travellers smiled as they looked again at their disgusting Reptile du jour. Still wearing a big smile, Lucy turned to Lena.

 

“Luthor. How about a nice drumstick?”

 

“It can’t be any worse than the food at the base,” Lena grumbled. She knew that if it was food and it was within Lucy’s reach, it would soon disappear.

 

“It could be poisonous,” Diggle pointed out, “none of us should eat it.”

 

“Diggle’s right. Lucy,” Alex’s voice was commanding, “we can’t afford to lose Lena. Taste it.”

 

Lucy was too hungry to complain about the implications of Alex’s decision. She picked up one of the long knives and, after checking with the Elders who gave her the go-ahead, sliced off one of the reptile’s thick hind legs. Nervous, she dropped it into the broth with a big splash, which caused laughter in the courtyard. Lucy looked up and saw that everyone in town was watching her. She managed a smile as she fished the drumstick out of the tureen and dropped it on her plate. She cut off a thin piece and brought it to her lips. With a deep breath, she plunged the alien flesh into her mouth and let it sit on her tongue. The townspeople started laughing, this time because of the expression on the woman’s face. She bit down once into the meat, and when nothing bad happened, she chewed and swallowed.

 

“Tastes like chicken.”

 

“Does it seem safe?”

 

“How should I know?” - slicing off another bite - “ask them if they’ve got any salt.”

 

Zor-El was looking down the table, watching with intense concern as Lucy chewed the food. For him, the acceptability of the meal was a matter of life and death. Lena saw how concerned Zor-El was and decided to reassure him using the word she had heard the old man use after eating her granola bar.

 

“Tastes good, uh, you know, it’s… _bonniwae_!” she said, reassuringly.

 

“ _Bonniwae_?” the man looked horrified. In his language, that meant sweet.

 

Lena cursed under her breath, frustrated. After all her travels and years of language classes, she couldn’t even communicate the simple idea of ‘delicious’. Zor-El was now speaking angrily to some of the serving people. Lena jumped in.

 

“Not _bonniwae_. Tastes like chicken. Chic-ken,” she said slowly. Zor-El had never seen a chicken, so he didn’t understand. Lena, thinking quick, tucked her thumbs under her armpits and did her impression of the animal.

 

No one had any idea what she was doing. They stared down the table, expressionless. Then Zor-El, deeply afraid of being rude to his guests, replied. Smiling politely, he tried to imitate Lena’s imitation. Wiggling his arms as he had seen his guest do, the dignified leader of this people gobbled back at Lena.

 

“Quit while you’re ahead, Luthor,” Lucy said between mouthfuls.

 

But Lena’s strongest need in life was to communicate her ideas. She didn’t give up. Although it took her several more tries, she finally got the idea across that the meal was fine.

 

As the dinner party wore on, both Lucy and Diggle became bolder about sampling the many exotic dishes brought before them. They joked and laughed with the elders at the table, learning the names of the foods and then twisting them into comic English. For example, the light brown chunky sauce that tasted like pork teriyaki was called _mba_ _hinjwui_. After a while, they called it ‘my behind juicy’.

 

Only Alex remained stone sober throughout the dinner, thinking and waiting as usual. She ate nothing but a few pieces of blackened bread and drank the water only after treating it with chlorine tablets.

 

Lena had moved down the table and was trying to converse with Zor-El, but their languages were so different that only the most primitive concepts could be communicated. She had thousands of questions but no words, not even a common vocabulary of hand gestures, to ask them. Using pantomime, she was several minutes into a question about their mining operation when she saw her again.

 

She was serving bread to one of the Elders at the far end of the table from a large basket. Lena completely lost track of the conversation. Zor-El turned to see what the woman was looking at.

 

She was radiant. Her blond hair was loose now and spilling over her shoulders. She wore a length of red cloth tied around her waist as a skirt and a blouse the same shade of blue of Zor-El’s outfit. As she moved closer, Lena couldn’t help but notice how tight fitting the blouse was. Lena looked away, embarrassed, but then quickly looked back trying to keep her eyes above her shoulders. She followed her every move as she made her way down the line of diners. She realised how absurd she was being, allowing herself to be so smitten with this girl she did not and probably could not know. But there was something so perfect about her, something beyond her outward beauty that called Lena to her. She watched her hands. Her blue eyes, the timing of her smiles. She was elegant beyond her years, and there was an intelligence to each of her gestures.

 

Something about her was so familiar, so right.

 

The first time Lena saw her, she had seemed timid and demure, but she had since realised that acting shy was merely the way these people expressed their politeness in public - and they were extremely polite. Each man she served seemed eager to engage her in conversation, as they would a favourite niece. The strength of her concentration as she listened, and the flash in her eyes as she responded told Lena many things: that she was completely comfortable around the city’s ruling class; that she was confident; and that she had a good sense of humour. Several times, she said things that made her guests laugh. She seemed smart enough to ‘work the crowd’ but warmhearted enough to take authentic joy in doing so.

 

If and when Lena ever got back to Earth, she hoped to someday find a woman half as enticing as this one. She tried to shake it off and return her conversation, but Zor-El was now busy with someone else.

 

“Here she comes, Romeo,” Diggle said with a smirk on his face. Everyone who wasn’t blind or brain-dead knew Lena was infatuated.

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lena shot back defensively, trying to save face.

 

“Wouldn’t be so bad would it? You two could honeymoon back at the pyramid. Rent a little apartment here. Find yourself a job in the mining pit. Maybe teach Greek and Latin to pick up money on the side. Start a little family.”

 

Lena leveled a murderous glare at the science officer, who was obviously amusing himself to no end. Feeling chastised and suddenly self-conscious, Lena turned away and pretended to listen to the musicians, still scraping and wheezing through their performance.

 

Diggle’s joke felt like a dagger in her heart. Here Lena was in another part of the universe, exploring an unknown world, feasting with its exotic inhabitants, but she couldn’t run away from the painful truth about herself. She was an unrealistic, romantic dork when it came to the same sex.

 

The next thing she knew, the girl was kneeling beside her, extending the basket. Her eyes were lowered, and she seemed to be smiling just a little. Lena reached into the basket and selected a treat that looked like a strawberry with hair. With the others, she had been animated and warm, but now she kept her eyes trained steadily on the floor. Saddened, Lena signaled that she was finished, allowing her to move on.

 

With her mind on other things, Lena started to put the berry into her mouth when something stopped her. It was the woman’s hand. She reached up to her lips and took the food in her hand. Then, kneeling very close, she showed Lena that she must first peel the fruit. She stripped away the small roots and the papery skin to expose the soft green fruit beneath.

 

Outwardly, Lena was calm. She seemed to be watching appropriate interest as she showed Lena this simple operation. But inside, she was a crowded theatre going up in flames. Utter, mind-numbing panic. The girl waited for her to reach out and take the fruit from her. When Lena didn’t, she did something that surprised her as much as it did Lena. She raised the berry to Lena’s lips and, very gently, fed it to her.

 

There was more tenderness in it, more intimacy, than either Lena or the woman felt comfortable with. This awkwardness was compounded by the several people who broke into a chorus of oohs and aahs. Lena turned and looked at the crowd. A hundred or so nosy people were watching, smiling back at her. In a flash, the girl was gone. All Lena could do was watch her go.

 

Zor-El looked towards a group of elderly women. The women conferred among themselves, then nodded back at him. Some decision had been made.

 

“Looks like your girlfriend’s got a headache,” Lucy called down the table, a remark that seemed to be understood even by those who spoke no English.

 

“Just shut up and eat your lizard, Lieutenant,” which is exactly what Lucy did.

 

“Luthor,” Alex called from the end of the table, “come over here.” Lena got up and went to where the colonel was sitting half in shadow, “you said that thing was an Egyptian symbol, right?”

 

“The _udjat_ , commonly known as the Eye of Ra,” explained Lena, “there are several variations of the motif, but the early tombs at Hierakonpolis and Abydos show the-”

 

“Yeah, yeah whatever,” Alex didn’t care, “look, it only stands to reason that if they know one Egyptian symbol…”

 

“...They’ll know others! We can write to one another. Let me try,” excited, she got to her feet, and with the attention of the entire courtyard focused on her, made her way in front of the Elders’ table. She got down to her knees and stared at the packed earth, trying to think of an appropriate symbol word. She scribbled the first thing that came into her head: “FEAST.” When she looked up, the Elders all looked like they were choking on their food, Zor-El stood up, shouting at Lena as he did so. Lena was panic-stricken. That particular glyph, she reasoned, probably meant something nasty in their language. Quickly, she rubbed the symbol out and began writing the first sentence in hieroglyphics she had ever learned, the first exercise in Gardiner’s Grammar:

 

“He says: the one who has come in peace, and traversed the heavens, is Ra.”

 

Lena wasn’t halfway through the sentence’s twenty-three signs when Zor-El’s sandal came down on top of her work. The man averted his eyes as he rubbed the message out with his foot. As he did this, he began shouting instructions for the crowd to disperse, flashing a nervous smile at Lena every few seconds. Zor-El was in a difficult position. On the one hand, the gods had strictly forbidden writing in all its forms. He, as shepherd of his people, was responsible for enforcing this rule. On the other hand, these strange visitors had probably been sent by Ra. Did the prohibition against writing extend to the gods themselves? Was this a test? Zor-El didn’t know. He chose to stop Lena from writing the way he made most of his decisions, out of habit.

 

As the hundreds of people began milling reluctantly towards the courtyard’s exits, Lena came back to her comrades.

 

“Why is it, Lena, that every time I tell you to communicate with these people, you cause some sort of explosion. What did you write?”

 

“Nothing, they’re totally overreacting. I wrote ‘banquet.’”

 

“That’s a pretty strong reaction,” Lucy said.

 

“I know, it’s almost like they’re afraid of writing.”

 

“More likely, they’re not allowed to write,” Alex theorized, “I don’t know what it is, but these people are scared shitless of something.”

 

When he’d obliterated the last of Lena’s chicken scratchings, Zor-El hurried over to where Lena was standing and fell to his knees, talking a mile a minute. He seemed to be apologising. During his speech, a group of young men came to whisk the dinner table away. Lucy reached out and snagged one last piece of lizard meat before they took it. A moment later, Zor-El had summoned the group of elderly women. They surrounded Lena, speaking their language, giggling at their own jokes, and playing with Lena’s clothes and hair.

 

Several more women arrived and began leading the soldiers to their sleeping quarters, whilst others pulled Lena towards hers.

 

“Should I go with them?” she asked Alex, really wanting to go. In spite of the responsibility still resting on her shoulders, the job of getting the team back through the Gate, she had only one thing on her mind. The women were taking her towards the same exit she’d seen the woman go through.

 

“Go ahead,” Alex said. As soon as the colonel discovered that these people had no writing, and nothing that could help them open the Stargate, Lena became useless to her. Alex rearranged her mental list of who was expendable, putting Lena on top.

* * *

 

Vasquez was dragged across the marble floor. Barely conscious, she felt like she’d been hit by a subway train. She was fighting to open her eyes, to stay alive, keep awake. Whoever was dragging her suddenly stopped and let her crash onto the floor. She concentrated on her breathing. She could taste the blood in her mouth, felt the marble floor cooling the side of her face. When she finally got her eyes open and focused, she saw where they’d brought her - to a sarcophagus. Standing in the middle of the room was a coffin-shaped stone box four feet high. She’d never seen a sarcophagus before but as soon as her eyes focused on it, she knew very clearly what it was. She assumed it was for her. But a moment later, the thing began to move. Section by section, the granite walls of the casket peeled away like the petals of a smooth mechanical lotus blossom. At the same time, a platform, like a narrow bed lifted upwards into the view. Atop this platform was a human body wrapped in a dark wet cloth. To Susan’s horror, the shape came to life. Very slowly, it sat up, then pushed away the damp shroud. When the cloth fell away from the figure’s face, Vasquez heard herself wail. Before her was a glowing golden face, a living version of the Tutankhamen death mask. Part humanoid, part otherworldly. The black eye sockets stared at her for an unendurable moment until the mask turned away. The terrified soldier heard something move up behind her, and a moment later, the butt end of a rifle-like weapon smashed into the back of her skull.

* * *

 

When the women were gone, Lena flopped down on the big lumpy bed in the centre of the room and let out a great sigh of relaxation.

 

“I smell like a yak,” she said to the walls.

 

For the last half hour, she had been lathered, shaved, undressed, bathed, powdered, groomed, manicured, massaged, perfumed, and dressed in a long white robe by the enthusiastic matrons. The mattress felt lumpy, like it was stuffed with balls of string. She didn’t care. It was just so good to lay down and relax. Her entire body was sore, scratched, sunburned and ready for sleep.

 

She told herself that she ought to spend an hour or so making notes on all the things she’d seen. But instead contented herself with replaying the sequence of events mentally. It seemed incredible to her that she had seen the Stargate for the first time only forty-eight hours before. And now here she was bedding down in the guest quarters of this town that could’ve existed in ancient Egypt.

 

She still wasn’t quite sure whether she’d stumbled into an archaeologists dream or nightmare. These people’s dress, customs, architecture, economy - every detail fascinated her, reshaping her notions of what life along the Nile must have been from 800-200 B.C. but nothing she had seen or learned helped her with the all-important task at hand: finding the code that would activate the Stargate in the pyramid. She remembered the conference-room discussion she’d had with General J’onzz and the promise she’d made to bring the soldiers back through the device. Ever since she’d arrived in this strange new place and had seen the great deserted pyramid in the dunes, she’d forgotten her promise. Tomorrow, she decided, she would refocus her concentration. To do that, she would have to leave Nagada.

 

Although these gentle people had been generous and welcoming beyond measure, they were unwilling to help her find the hieroglyphs she needed. They obviously knew what writing was, otherwise they wouldn’t have reacted as quickly and strongly as they did. After the party-ending episode with Zor-El in the central square, Lena had tried again with the women who had lead her to this room. One of them had a highly polished piece of silver that she used as a mirror. Across the surface of this, Lena had sprinkled some white powder and then drew a couple of symbols. The women met these attempts to communicate with the same aggressive refusal Zor-El had shown. They took the mirror away and wagged their fingers at her. Alex’s theory made sense: it was as if writing was forbidden. The question of who had done the forbidding wasn’t Lena’s problem. Not yet.

 

She made up her mind that first thing in the morning, she must somehow convince these people to lead her to another city where the people could speak, write, and think for themselves.

 

Lena felt herself drifting off. She could hear a procession of musicians in the street below making their way towards her apartment. They played their instruments at a mercifully low volume. A moment later, there was unmistakable whispering outside her door. She bolted up, thinking there might be danger. A hand reached through the curtains and parted them, allowing someone to step inside.

 

It was her. The girl she’d been so interested in. Now she was moving towards her, eyes cast on the ground, wrapped in a long white robe like the one she was wearing. Lena’s heart pole vaulted into her throat. She got to her feet, wondering what was going on. The woman looked nervous, unsure of herself as she walked towards her. When she was halfway across the room, she stopped and loosened the knot in her sash, letting the robe fall to the floor, exposing her beautiful naked body.

 

Lena gulped.


	13. The Discovery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this has taken so long. I had gotten halfway through this chapter when my laptop crashed. After turning it back on, I had lost all progress except for the chapter title and I had to rewrite it all. Add Christmas and work and it's been a hectic few weeks but thank you for your patience and sticking with the story.

Everything in this primitive city was rugged, dilapidated and scarred. The rocky plaster of Lena’s sleeping chamber looked jagged in the uneven candle light. This background made the girl’s smooth skin seem all the more miraculous. She stood there with her robe at her ankles, trembling ever so slightly, looking at Lena. Neither of them knew exactly what to do next.

 

By the time the shock wore off, Lena was blushing hotter than a red pepper. She quickly realized what was going on.

 

“You don’t have to do that,” she said, and bent down to retrieve the girl’s robe. She could see that this delicate creature was frightened. Obviously, the Elders had seen Lena eyeing her and had decided to give her a gift. Suddenly she was terribly embarrassed. She had been every indiscreet, and now her infatuation had lead to this traumatic episode for this innocent woman. She picked up the robe and went to drape it over the woman’s shoulders, but to Lena’s surprise, the woman resisted being dressed. Although she couldn’t understand Lena’s words, Lena tried to explain.

 

“I’m so sorry. Really, truly sorry. Don’t worry, you don’t have to go through with this. I mean, I like you, believe me. You’re really beautiful, but… do you understand?”

 

Eventually, she allowed herself to be wrapped up in the robe. Lena put an arm around her and tenderly escorted her to the door. She pulled back the curtain and, just to make sure she understood how much she liked her, she put her hand on her cheek and smiled tenderly.

 

About a hundred people, the town Elders among them, had gathered on the footbridge just outside waiting for the outcome of the girl’s visit. Another crowd of people were gawking from the balcony of the building across the narrow street.

 

“ _Kha shi ma nelay_?” Zor-El barked at Kara, “ _Kha shi_?”

 

The girl tried explaining something to the man, but he flew off the handle, angrily shaking his finger and yelling at her. Kara gave up trying to explain, hung her head, and started sobbing. Zor-El turned to Lena, suddenly humble and pleasant. He started apologizing rapidly in his language, afraid Kara had done something to upset their esteemed guest. Grovelling theatrically, he came forward until he grabbed Kara by the wrist, intending to drag her off. In a flash, Lena had her free hand and was pulling her back. She wrapped an arm around Kara’s shoulder and smiled her biggest, brightest smile.

 

“Just wanted to say-” she fumbled for words, “-er, to say… thanks! Yes, that’s it: thank you so much. I couldn’t be more pleased. It’s a really weird thing for you to do, but the point I’m trying to make here is thank you, thank you, thank you.” She knew these people couldn’t understand her words, but perhaps Zor-El would understand her tone of voice.

 

The crowd stared back at her uncomprehendingly as she pushed the woman back inside.

 

“Good night now!”

 

Lena pulled the curtains closed and breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing she wanted was to get this girl in trouble. She turned and looked at her.

 

“Sorry about that.”

 

A look of surprise flashed across her face. A moment later, the woman was untying her robe once more.

 

“No, no, that’s okay!” Lena motioned for her to stop, and, completely confused, she did. Lena signalled for her to sit down on the bed, which she did. Lena crossed the room until she was a comfortable distance away and sat down with her back against the wall. They looked at each other. Lena smiled. The girl smiled. They looked at one another some more.

 

Since the moment Lena had laid eyes on her, she’d wanted nothing more than to be close to her, to spend some quiet time learning to overcome their linguistic and cultural differences. Now that opportunity was here, she didn’t know what to say.

* * *

 

Lucy, Diggle and Alex had been take to quarters on the far side of the same building. Each was given a separate room radiating off a common parlour. They had gathered in the parlour, the only room with windows. For thirty minutes, Diggle had been working the radio equipment, trying every trick he knew to raise Vasquez and the others.

 

Alex stood at one of the windows where she could see the storm beating against the huge walls that circled the city. With her back turned to the others, Alex was absent mindedly rolling something around between her fingers. It was the orange key she had taken from the device hidden in the bowels of the equipment cart. When the curtains covering the main entryway opened, Alex quickly pocketed the key. Lucy unholstered her pistol.

 

They had a visitor. It was Kal-El, who was starting to make it his business to go everywhere Alex went. His desire to stick close to the colonel put him in a minority of one. The people of Nagada, like Alex’s soldiers, sensed dangerous unpredictability oozing from the woman with red hair and had tried to keep their distance. Everyone, that is, except this kid, the first person Alex had frightened. Now he was following her everywhere, studying her every move. As soon as she was in the room, Kal-El hurried to a corner and sat down against the wall, showing he wouldn’t be any trouble. Lucy looked at Alex, who nodded that it was okay for the boy to stay.

 

During the banquet, Alex had noticed the teenager sitting in the shadows, watching. And that’s what he was doing right now.

 

Alex left Diggle and Lucy, walking into her private chamber where she sat down in one of the uncomfortable chairs. The boy, afraid but determined to act fearlessly, came into the room and sat down a few feet away.

 

Alex, ignoring the kid, took a cigarette out of her pack and lit it. A habit she had picked up upon the death of her son alongside the drinking. When the flame shot out of the lighter, the boy nearly jumped out of his skin. Nevertheless, when he’d caught his breath, he reached over and pulled a cigarette out of the pack, mimicking Alex’s movements, pretending to smoke.

 

“Lighter,” Alex pronounced the word carefully, then tossed the Zippo to Kal-El. The boy lit the lighter several times, fascinated, before clumsily lighting the end of his cigarette. Casting a sidelong glance at the boy, Alex flicked the ash from her cigarette. Kal-El did the same.

 

The two of them sat there for a moment. Kal-El was starting to feel pretty damn confident. He was, after all, the only one hanging out with these remarkable visitors. Alex saw the boy’s cockiness and couldn’t resist. She took a long drag on her cigarette then inhaled deeply. With a wise-guy smirk on his face, Kal-El went through the same motion, but the split second the hot smoke reached his lungs, his eyes bulged wide-open. He came up gagging. He doubled over and staggered across the room until he crashed into the bed, the fire in his throat and nose getting worse as he coughed.

 

Diggle and Lucy could hear the kid coughing, but decided to not go and investigate.

 

When he could, Kal-El propped himself against the bed and threw the foul little thing on the floor, never to smoke again.

 

“Good idea,” muttered the colonel, extinguishing her own smoke then coming across the room to ground out the one the boy had thrown. When she looked up, she got an ugly surprise. The boy, his eyes still full of water, was reaching for the pistol he’d seen Alex fire that afternoon near the city’s main gate. Just as the curious young man’s fingers touched the barrel of the gun, he heard Alex roar.

 

“No! Dangerous!” Alex pinned the boy’s hand on the bed, knocking the gun away. Then she deliberately slapped Kal-El’s hand, slapped it hard. Diggle and Lucy came around the corner in time to see Alex, the pistol in one hand, shaking the kid with the other, chanting, “no.”

 

The moment Alex turned him loose, Kal-El darted for the door and escaped. The colonel followed him across the room, pulled the curtains open, and watched him flee.

 

When the boy was gone, Alex sat down on the rock-hard bed they’d given her and concentrated on cleaning her pistol. Her encounter with Kal-El had surprised her - they had actually played together - something Alex hadn’t done in quite some time. And just as she expected, her thoughts began drifting back to Earth and her own son.

 

Even before they’d adopted Jaime, Alex began to change. Not only did she start feeling happier and more alive, but for the first time that she could remember, she actually began looking forward to coming home. The adoption was the most rewarding thing she’d ever been a part of. At the same time, she was losing her taste for bloodshed and violence.

 

The afternoon of her son’s sixth birthday party had been a crucial day. Standing behind her son at the head of the table, excitedly helping the boy rip into his presents, Alex looked up and caught Maggie smiling at her. An intense feeling of gratitude flooded into her out of nowhere. She realized that she was no longer the angry, empty kid she had been whilst growing up, the girl that would hurt people and things because she didn’t know any other way to be. Maggie had done this for her, and even though they’d already been married for quite some time, she suddenly understood that she owed this woman her life.

 

The next morning, she walked into the staff sergeant’s office and told them she wanted out. At first, her superiors refused. Alex was the team’s to-go-to-woman, the best soldier in this elite fighting squad. But Alex was adamant and, eventually, rather than drive her from the armed services all together, they gave her an instructor’s position at the Marine Corps training facility nearby. They warned her, however, that Special Forces personnel of her calibre never really retired. Someday, she would be called upon for another mission. Of course, she hadn’t imagined it would lead her to anything like her present assignment, especially after she’d been tossed out of the service.

 

Alex and her son, Jamie, were undoubtedly best friends. As a player-coach combo, they became the perennial team to beat at the local little league. The only disturbing thing was that somehow, despite his mother’s transformation, the boy had inherited the same wildness of her Alex had. He started getting into more and more trouble at school, crossing the line between ‘rowdy’ and ‘violent’. Maggie was concerned about it, naturally, but when she tried to bring the subject up, Alex and their son closed ranks. They would exchange smirking smiles.

 

Remembering how she’d indulged the boy’s recklessness, Alex sighed loudly enough to attract the attention of Lucy and Diggle. Alex banged her head backwards against the wall. She didn’t do this violently, but it was more than enough to draw stares from the two soldiers at the window.

 

Diggle turned to Lucy and, trying to keep the question as light as possible, asked, “is it just me, or is there something real wrong with that lady?”

 

“Just follow her orders,” Lucy said, “she must’ve been put in charge for a good reason.”

 

Diggle stared back at her for a minute before asking, “you really believe that?”

* * *

 

They had been sitting there staring at each other for an awfully long time before Lena felt the need to try talking. She cleared her throat like she was about to call a meeting to order, then introduced herself to the angel sitting stiffly on her bed.

 

“I’m Lena. Lena.”

 

“Lean-err?” she asked.

 

“No, Lay-na. Me Lena,” she enunciated carefully, pointing to herself. She smiled tentatively and nodded.

 

“Lay-na,” the woman repeated before pointing to herself and saying, “Kara.”

 

“Kara? Okay, Kara. Hi.”

 

After another awkward pause. Lena went on.

 

“We came from the pyramid,” she looked at Kara, “you know, pyramid? Four equal sides converging to a single apex. Um, you’re probably not going to like this, but I’m going to draw you a picture.” She raced her forefinger through the sand on the floor, outlining the shape, then looked up at her expectantly. Kara turned her head and averted her eyes.

 

“I know, I know. You’re not allowed,” frustrated, she stood up and walked to the far side of the room, put her forehead against the wall, and went on talking, “what is it with you people? I mean, I’ve heard of graphophobia, but this is ridiculous. Anyway, you’re obviously not going to be able to help us find what we need, so I should just give it a rest, right?” Kara sensed how frustrated she was. She took a deep breath and a huge risk. When Lena turned around, she was leaning over the drawing she had made, augmenting it.

 

Lena came back across the room to see what she was doing. Across the peak of the pyramid, she drew a line and above that, a circle. It was the same sign Lena had found on the cover stones, the seventh symbol that had cracked the code to the Stargate.

 

“That’s the sign for Earth! Do you know this symbol?!”

 

Kara looked up at Lena, suddenly very nervous. She had broken one of her people’s fundamental laws, a violation that could lead to her immediate beheading. Since she wasn’t dead already, she calculated that Lena wasn’t an agent sent by the gods to test the city. But now she had another problem. She had to communicate the extreme danger of the situation to her. She knew she’d want to know more, but she couldn’t help her any further until she understood how dangerous reading and writing were.

 

 

With Kara holding a torch and showing Lena the way, Lena pulled the hood of the robe she’d found for her low over her face. As they stole furtively through the winding streets, Lena realized that Nagada was built on a slope. They were nearing the corrals where the hundred or so _mastadges_ were kept penned up at night. They were ‘perfuming the evening’ with the pungent aroma of fresh dung. The back perimeter wall of the compound loomed in the distance. Then Kara stopped at a tall stone building with a doorway defined by a graceful lancet arch. She pulled Lena by the sleeve into the pitch-black atrium where the torch’s flickering threw just enough light into the recesses of the abandoned structure for Lena to see that it was probably once a covered marketplace, but now, judging from the intense smell of manure, acted as a commodious compost heap. Lena’s eyes began to tear up under the assault of the biting acrid stench.

 

Taking Lena deeper into the squalid darkness, Kara showed her a stone staircase that lead down to a dead end. Whatever door might have once stood at the bottom of these stairs had long since been blocked over with large stones. Nevertheless, they descended. About halfway down, Kara passed the torch to Lena and reached into the gap between the stairs and the wall. She loosened a hidden retaining pin, then pushed one of the stone slabs out of the way, revealing a narrow opening - just enough space for them to slide through.

 

Once they were inside, they found themselves in the basement of the building in a thick forest of beams that rose up to support the wooden floor above them. Low corridors ran off in several directions. Kara took the torch back from Lena and led her into one of these dank passages. She hadn’t been down there since she was a little girl, but after only a couple of wrong turns, she brought them to the top of another narrow staircase. This one was very ancient, and carved from a single large stone that had begun to crumble in several places. At the bottom of these stairs, they found themselves in a square earthen cell. More tunnels twisted away into the darkness, but Kara brought the torch close to the wall, filthy with years of dust and grime, and illuminated the symbol for Earth: sun-over-pyramid.

 

Astonished, Lena came to the wall and reached out to touch it. It had been carefully carved an inch deep into a smooth section of the stone wall. It was the only writing in the room. Lena thought for a minute and then noticed that all the walls were made of roughly cut stone. All except the area around the symbol. On a hunch, she began brushing the centuries of dirt away from the lone hieroglyph until she found what she was looking for - a crevice.

 

The sign was cut into the middle of a door. She scraped away as much dirt as she could between the door and jamb, she wedged her fingers into the space. Prying at it with all she was worth, she managed to budge it open about half an inch. Kara propped the torch against the wall and lent her fingers, as strong as Lena’s, to the effort. Finally, the door swung open.

 

Lena pushed the torch through the doorway.

 

“Oh my god,” Lena couldn’t believe what she was looking at. There was a narrow hallway five feet tall and approximately fifty feet long. Every inch of it was jammed with Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, the long dead language she could read and write fluently. There were portraits, painted scenes, etchings and carved reliefs in the classic ‘frontalism’ style. But mainly there was text, long strips of hieroglyphic writing chiselled into the walls.

 

Lena thought she must’ve died and gone to Egyptologist heaven. Kara had led her into a lush forest of mysterious signs, probably the most densely written and rewritten palimpsest ever. An intense, convoluted puzzle that, despite its jumbled, Talmudic format, was executed with religious care, giving the room a shrine quality. Lena licked her lips and waded deeper into the room.

 

Kara couldn’t believe it, either. Like everyone in Nagada, she vaguely knew what writing was even though she couldn’t do it. As a child, she and her friends had invented several symbols and written each other notes in the sand. But when they were discovered, they were punished severely.

 

In her world, there was no need for writing. There were no books, street signs, or spelling bees. They had stories of course, but only ones that were spoken. Once a song or story was forgotten, it was lost forever. Before stepping into this small corridor, she had absolutely no idea that this galaxy of symbols existed. She couldn’t comprehend how utterly complex the rules for understand them must be. She looked at Lena with new eyes: was she a witch that she could interpret and make these marks?

 

Obviously she was. Holding the torch to the wall, she’d already been able to discern that every entry told a story. The earliest were large historical tableaux. Generations of historians who came later found whatever space was left and shaped their stories to fit the empty spots. Most of the writing moved right to left, but some of it went in the opposite direction. Where necessary, the script ran top to bottom whilst in other places it was written in the style called boustrophedon, the back-and-forth format that meant, literally, ‘an ox travels back and forth when ploughing the fields’. This riot of writing, this colourful cacophony of characters, taken together, was a semiotic treasure chest, a cave full of archaeological loot. It was the ancient history of the people of this world.

 

Lena isolated the cave’s original story. Told in relatively large pictures sculpted directly onto the wall, then painted over, it was not an uplifting tale. The first panel depicted several of the tutelary gods, the same anthropomorphised animal deities worshipped in ancient Egypt. They were tearing children from the grasps of their screaming mothers, herding them away across the desert. Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead, seemed to be supervising the work of the other gods. Horus, the hawk, was present as was Thoth, the baboon-headed deity of words and magic, the one who recorded the names of the dead in the underworld.

 

The scene shifted to some kind of battle or civil uprising, and then the people were shown in chains floating over the desert, as if in a collective dream. When they woke, they fell to the ground where the gods and their warriors brutalized the people, forcing them through the Stargate.

 

Lena studied the hieroglyphic writing surrounding the pictures. The grammatical elements were definitely related to the writing she’d found on the cover stones, but the symbols before her were even more rudimentary. No one on Earth had spoken the language of the ancient Egyptians since the last temples were ordered closed by the Christian Emperor Theodosius 1 in A.D. 391. Since the hieroglyphics left behind on temple walls and papyrus scrolls was written in consonants only, linguistic researchers could only speculate about the vowel structure. Several top-notch Egyptologists, Lena included, had developed pronunciation schemes, but they were all largely guesswork. Lena, never afraid to venture a guess, started reading the signs aloud.

 

Holding the torch, she moved close to a section of the glyph-cluttered wall and began, “ _naadas yan tu yeewah. Suma’ehmay ra ma yedat._ ” It was a story about moving across a desert, a population migrating not out of choice, but by force.

 

Kara watched and listened carefully. As Lena read the signs on the wall, she tried to see the connection between the painted symbols and the sounds she was making.

 

“ _Nandas sikma tiyu na’nay ashay_ ,” Lena continued.

 

“ _Seekhma_?” Kara asked, the word had caught her attention.

 

Lena whipped her head around and looked at Kara. Was she trying to communicate? Had she stumbled across a word Kara understood?

 

In Kara’s language, _seekhma_ was the word meaning ‘children’. Over Lena’s shoulder, she could see a picture, carved into the wall, a scene of many people being herded like animals. Many of the figures were clearly intended to represent children. “ _Seekhma_ ,” she said again.

 

“ _Sikma_?” Lena asked urgently, pointing to the hieroglyph for children. Kara looked at the symbol, which held no meaning for her.

 

“ _Seekhma_ ,” she said, pointing to the illustration on the wall, singling out the children.

 

“Yes!” Lena yelled, “yes, _sikma_ , children! Of course!”

 

Lena’s suspicion had been right all along. Kara and her people spoke a dialect of ancient Egyptian. And, by a stroke of sheer luck, they had stumbled across the word, __seekhma__ , which had changed little over the centuries.

 

Excited, Lena immediately found another symbol, the one for ‘god’.

 

“ _Nefer_?” This time the written symbol was more abstract. The glyph consisted of an eye over two feathers. Kara looked at the symbol, but couldn’t immediately guess its meaning.

 

“ _Nef-ear? Najfar_?” Lena asked, then showed her the picture of Anubis and several other animal deities who were herding the humans across the desert.

 

“ _Neyoum ifar_!” Kara yelled, as if she had just won a round of charades.

 

“ _Nay-youm-ee-far_?” Lena asked, realizing how radically different their pronunciations were. She practised saying the word several times, quickly bringing her accent in line with hers. She was doing it, she was speaking the dead language of the Pharaohs, a language she had been looking at for many years.

 

Kara said the word several times, carefully enunciating each syllable, teaching Lena to say it the way she did.

 

“Yes,” she was agog, “teach me to speak. Uh, teach - _takera_? _Tekira_? Kara _takera_ Lena, okay?”

 

“ _Kara tahki-yeer Lay-na_.”

 

It was the first time in her life that someone had openly asked her to teach them. Kara swelled with pride. This woman with all her exotic skills was asking her for instruction. It was the first moment of her transformation.

 

For her part, Lena was smiling like she had died and gone to heaven with this beautiful woman assigned to be her guide. And it wasn’t even midnight yet.

* * *

 

According to the watch on Alex’s wrist, it was 8:21 P.M, Rocky Mountain Time. But beyond the city’s fortress walls, the first of the day’s three suns was dawning on the horizon. The storm was over, and the dark sky looked utterly clear.

 

Alex stood at one of the parlour room’s windows next to Diggle, who had set the radio on the sill and was trying to reestablish contact with Vasquez in total disregard of whether the neighbours might still be sleeping. He had a big strong voice to begin with, and now that he was frustrated and starting to fear for the base-camp team, it became even stronger. Finally, he turned to Alex.

 

“No use, I can’t raise them.”

 

“What are you getting? More interference?”

 

“No,” he replied, “nothing but dead air. There should at least be a tracking signal, but I’m not getting anything.”

 

“Colonel!” the shout came from outside.

 

Alex crossed the room and stepped out onto one of the many rope and lumber footbridges suspended between the buildings. In the shadowy street below, she could make out the vague outline of her lieutenant.

 

“Luthor’s not in her room,” Lucy called up, “I’ve been looking everywhere, but I can’t find her.”

 

“What’s that your holding?”

 

“Her jacket,” Lucy answered, obviously peeved about having to carry it around for her royal professorship.

 

Alex looked out at the horizon where the night sky was melting to purple morning. They could feasibly leave now for the pyramid, but Alex decided to wait for full daylight. She estimated it would be another half hour before they had full visibility.

 

The colonel figured Lena was most likely out collecting wildflowers and writing poetry, but there was the odd chance something very good or very bad had happened. If that was the case, she wanted to know about it. They could afford thirty minutes of looking for her, no more.

 

Two minutes later, Alex was downstairs. She and Lucy were following their noses towards the sharp smell coming off from the _mastadge_ corral. They spotted Kal-El sitting on the fence surrounded by a handful of other kids.

 

Kal-El still had Alex’s lighter. He felt he had earned the right to brag about his encounter with the aliens, and that’s exactly what he was doing, firing up the lighter and retelling the story about how he’d gotten it. Nab-Eh, the crazy-looking shepherd with the big head and wild teeth kept trying to touch the flame even though Kal-El warned him not to. Nab-Eh, older and slower than the other boys, was Kal-El’s sidekick and devoted pal.

 

The boys scattered when they saw the two soldiers walking towards them. All except Kal-El, even though he was as frightened as any of them. He knew firsthand how unpredictable and violent the woman with the red hair could be. Kal-El sat on the fence without flinching.

 

“Wait here,” Alex told Lucy. She walked over to the boy by herself. She leaned against the corral fence and watched the big woolly _mastadges_ work out some of their morning energy by racing around the corral. She wanted to tell the kid that she was sorry about slapping him the night before, that she’d done it strictly out of concern for the boy’s safety. And if she’d overreacted, she at least had plenty of reason to do so because of everything she’d been going through for the past couple of years. But Alex, even if she spoke the boy’s language wouldn’t have been able to dive that far into her own feelings without starting to drown. Instead, she stood there quietly watching the _mastadges_ sprint through the cold morning air. When she looked over at the boy, Kal-El lit up an imaginary cigarette, took a deep drag, and then exhaled visibly into the frosty morning air. The kid was letting her off the hook, showing her there were no hard feelings.

 

“I’m looking for Lena,” Alex said to the boy, who, of course, didn’t understand, “see? Luthor,” she held up the jacket, but still got no glimmer. The other boys began edging their way closer. How could the colonel get her message across to them? Speaking slowly and too loudly, she explained, “we’re… looking for… Luthor,” Alex made wing gestures with her arms, flapping them slightly.

 

“Oh!” Kal-El suddenly understood and pointed to Alex, “ _bock bock, bock bock _?”__ in a fairly good imitation of Lena’s chicken sounds. They all understood at once. All the boys quickly joined in like a choir of chickens.

 

“Yeah, that’s right. Chicken lady. Where’s the chicken lady?” Alex asked, happy to finally have made some connection with these kids.

 

Kal-El took Lena’s jacket from Alex and then yelled some type of command to the animals. A moment later, the mangiest member of the herd, “Little Bit,” came trotting over to the fence, neighing like a truck motor badly in need of oil.

 

Kal-El held the jacket up to the _mastadge’s_ nose. When Lena’s smell penetrated the beast’s giant nostrils, it suddenly reared up on its thin but powerful hind legs and let out a roar that woke up half the city.

 

Kal-El shouted for Nab-Eh to let her out. As soon as the gate was open, the big ox came barrelling out of the corral at a furious clip. She was half a block away before Kal-El led the boys in pursuit of the animal.

 

“Smart boy,” Alex said.

* * *

 

A cracked and faded pyramid hovered in the sky, rays of light as bright as the sun’s shooting from its underside. Below, the deteriorating image of boy-king, attired in full Pharaonic regalia, extending his arms to bathe in the light. At his feet, several of ancient Egypt’s animal-headed deities were kneeling, their heads bowed in supplication.

 

Lena scratched her chin, thinking. She was sure now that this sequence of paintings had come first. Whoever the original historian to come down into these catacombs had begun with this story, the strange coronation of this boy-king. Kara was leaning against the opposite wall doing her best to stay awake and help Lena with the work. She’d never seen anything like the incredible concentration she brought to this task.

 

“ _Barei bidipeesh_?” she asked Kara, “ _shana _?_ Sha’ana_?”

 

“ _Chan’ada_ ,” Kara gave her the pronunciation.

 

“ _Chan’ada sedma miznah, no: miz- mir- mirnaz. Chan’ada sedma mirnaz, min_?”

 

“ _Min_ ,” Kara said with a smile.

 

“Looks like you found what you were looking for,” a voice came from the darkness.

 

Kara gasped, and Lena, caught completely by surprise, thrust the torch wildly in the direction of the voice. It was Alex stooping to walk under the narrow chamber’s low ceiling with Lucy right behind her.

 

“You scared the shit out of me,” Lena yelled, her heart thumping like mad, “how’d you get down here?”

 

“I thought you didn’t speak their language,” Alex said hotly, coming deeper into the chaotically painted passageway.

 

“It’s ancient Egyptian,” Lena said, “but like the rest of their culture, it’s evolved independently, like how the translation referred to Ra as ‘Rao’. But, once you know the vowels, take into account the neutralization of aspiration, the loss of apical and final consonants-”

 

“Give it to me in English, Lena.”

 

“I just had to learn how to pronounce it,” Lena simplified, “it hasn’t been a living spoken language in more than a thousand years?”

 

“This place is a damn trip,” said Diggle, coming around the corner with a powerful flashlight, “it looks like King Tut’s tomb got turned into a subway station full of graffiti.”

 

Alex was interested in only one thing, “what does it say in here, Lena?”

 

Exhilarated, eager to explain what she had learned, Lena moved across the riot of hieroglyphs like a kid in a candy store.

 

“It’s… well, it’s simply unbelievable. These walls tell the story of the original settlers of this planet. These people came through the Stargate some ten thousand years ago. It says…” Lena walked up to a long series of drawings and hieroglyphs, tracing her finger quickly over the etchings.

 

“A traveller, from distant stars, escaped from a dying world looking for a way to extend his own life. His body was decaying and weak, yet with all his powers and knowledge he could not prevent his own demise,” Lena paraphrased, “apparently, his whole species was becoming extinct, so he searched the galaxies looking for a way to cheat death. Look here…”

 

Again Lena rushed over to another series of drawings. As Alex listened to Lena, she became lost in the story. It was as though Alex could completely visualise every word Lena said. The visions did not so much surprise Alex, but confirm something deep within her darkest worries. She listened intently as Lena continued.

 

“It says he came to ‘a world, rich with life.’ Where he encountered a ‘primitive race, perfect for his needs.’ Humans! A species he could repair and maintain indefinitely. He realized, within a human body, he had a chance for a new life. That’s when he found the boy!”

 

Lena moved over to a series of strange drawings. Etched crudely was a flying pyramid hovering over a human, shielding his eyes from the bright light. Around the drawing, several other people were running away. Lena pointed to the figure beneath the pyramid.

 

“He came to some kind of village. It says that the villagers ran, frightened as ‘the night became day.’ But one young boy walked towards the light. ‘Curious and without fear,’ he walked into a trap. Ra, or Rao, took this boy and possessed him. It’s like some kind of parasite looking for a host. Transposed into this human form, he appointed himself ruler of all mankind. The original Pharaoh, Ra, the sun god.”

 

“ _Rao_ ,” Kara corrected quietly, shrinking away when Alex and Lucy’s eyes turned to her.

 

“Okay, Rao,” Lena nodded, “using the Stargate, Rao brought thousands of people here to this planet as workers for the quartz mines. Just like the one we saw. Clearly, this quartz-mine mineral found here is the building block of all his technology. Only with this could he sustain eternal life. But something happened back on Earth, a rebellion or uprising. After hundreds of years of oppression, the people waited until Rao was here, on this side of the Gate, then they revolted, overtaking Rao’s guardian war gods, and they buried the Gate so Rao could never return. Fearful that a rebellion could happen here on this world. Rao outlawed reading and writing. He didn’t want the people here to remember the truth. These drawings here are the only record they have, and none of them can read it! It’s amazing.”

 

When Lena was finished, she waited for Alex to respond, but she didn’t say anything, didn’t move. She only stared at the wall, a faraway look of concentration on her face.

 

“Luthor, I think you better come over here,” Lucy had taken the flashlight and was exploring farther down the shaft, “tell me if this is… just get over here.” The woman sounded so excited about whatever it was, Kara automatically got up to see what it was.

 

Lucy was only about ten yards away from the group, but with the low ceiling, the darkness, and the torches, it was tough getting to her. It wasn’t a place for claustrophobics.

 

Lucy had gone around a corner and found the corridor’s dead end. Enshrined in sacred writing on all sides, stood a single thin stone pillar with a vertical cartouche. Even though it was partially buried in the sand, Lucy could see how similar it was to the one that ran down the centre of the cover stones. Lena could too. As soon as she turned the corner and saw the shrine, she knew they’d found what they needed to operate the Gate.

 

“They must have kept this here hoping that one day the Gate on Earth could be reopened,” Lena said, then poked the torch close to the tablet and tried to read the cartouche. She didn’t understand a single character, which was encouraging. That probably meant they were constellations as seen from wherever this place was in the universe.

 

“Damn,” she suddenly remembered something, “my notebook is back there in my room. I made a list of all the signs on the-”

 

“Your jacket, ma’am,” Lucy unceremoniously shoved the jacket at Lena, then went to work on digging out the lowest couple of symbols from the sand. Lena consulted her notes. Sure enough, the top symbol on the cartouche matched one of those on her list.

 

“We’ve got it,” Lena proclaimed, “they match.”

 

“Problem. Big problem,” Lucy was grave. Flash and torchlight converged on the soldier, then moved down to the bottom of the cartouche. The last symbol was missing, broken off.

 

“Where’s the seventh sign?”

 

Lucy got frustrated and started scooping up rough handfuls of dank soil, throwing them aside. Lena stopped her quickly and took control of the excavation process. She dug carefully along the base of the wall until she found the fragmented remains of the seventh symbol, one piece at a time.

 

They spent a long time trying to fit the pieces together. All they needed was enough of the symbol to distinguish it from the others on the Stargate’s wheel. After twenty minutes, they realized it was useless. Either the tablet had been intentionally broken or it had simply been eroded by too many years in the sand.

 

There was no trace of the last symbol.

 

Lena and the soldiers were stunned. There was a feeling that their incredible string of good luck had finally ended. It seemed appropriate that they were gathered around the tunnel’s dead end. Now the team had two chances of ever getting home: slim and none. It was a long time before anyone spoke.

 

“This seventh sign is supposed to be the point of origin, right?” Alex asked, “ask the girl. Maybe she knows the sign for this planet.”

 

Kara, watching the scene unfold, guessed what the colonel must be asking and shook her head.

 

Lena put the question to her anyway, then turned to Alex, “no good, she can’t write anything except the name of Rao.”

 

“In that case, we’re heading back to the pyramid,” Alex stood up and took the torch from Kara. When none of the others got to their feet, she made herself clear, “we leave immediately.”

 

“Don’t you understand? I can’t make it work without the last symbol,” Lena shouted at her. But Alex didn’t even look back.


	14. UPDATE!

Hey guys, 

 

I thought I'd offer an update on the status of this story as I haven't updated in a while.

 

This story isn't over. 

 

I've recently been writing another story, and rather than writing a chapter and then uploading, I'm writing it all in one go. 

 

Because of that, my focus has shifted from this story to that one.

 

I promise I will return to this story, but I want to finish writing my other one first.

 

Thank you for being patient with me,

 

KryptonianHero


End file.
